 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of the affordable liquid coolers wet dream. Get it? It's a wet dream because they're dreaming about liquid cooling. Not sure what you guys thought I was talking about. This my friends is the half stacker. There's actually two parts I have here today. The half stacker 935 and the half stacker 915F. So inside this one we have a full blown mini ITX case that can also be stacked to this one. And inside this one we have two components. The 925 which is the sort of the main that's where your ATX chassis is piece as well as another 915. But in this case it's a 915R. So unboxing the half stacker 935 is a bit of a treat. Holy cow. So huge. Inside we find a fairly thick but hard foam. Ah, static shock. Awesome. Fairly thick hard foam but at least it's on the fairly thick side. And they put another reinforcement piece right here mid package. So there's actually three pieces of foam on the thing. Since we took it out upside down the case is of course upside down and this will reveal the first look at the half stacker. Alright now that we've flipped it over we're going to find a couple of things here. So number one is that mid section actually goes right in between the two pieces of the case that are included with the 935 package. So here we find the stacker 915R in all of its glory. And then under that, okay here we go, here's another nice thick piece of foam. Very hardy looking. Throw that back in the box. Is the 925. So you can clearly see this is not really meant necessarily to be its own stand alone chassis. The top is, it's, it's holy. It's full of holes. You know holy, holy holes Batman as Robin would say if that show still existed. We also have a nice little instruction booklet on how to stack which of course refers to the popular pastime of cup stack. No actually it refers to how to stack the half stacker. So there's a few different configurations they show you. Half 945 is a half 935 which is what you see here plus another half 915 which is what we have. So that's a main one and two small ones. You can put three half 915s that's as high as CluMaster recommends going without additional support. Or you can do two half 915s or you can just have one of these or just one of these and there are lots of different options. So I think the only way to really tackle an unusual case like this is in a bit of an unusual fashion. So we'll start at the bottom where we have, okay so there's actual rubber grommets right in the bottom of your case. What is going, what madness is this? This is the way that you are going to be able to pass through cables or water cooling tubes or whatever else you might want into potentially a second 915 that is on the bottom of the 925 here. So I'm going to show you how you would remove the removable feet just like this. Pull those babies off and then you can turn this into a stackable modular rail here. So that can be used to stack onto an additional case. We've also got a removable power supply fan filter right here on the bottom. A fairly small one but no, no not too many marks off for that. And now let's continue with this unorthodox chassis here. Now we're going to go to the right side panel where we will find not a whole lot, blank side panel. Alright now we're going to go to the top where, ah yes see that probably looks familiar now. That is that same stacking interface. Nice rugged robust plastic considering the price of this case. It's actually quite well built from my initial impressions. Then we can move around to the front of the case where we find three 5 1⁄4 inch drive bays as well as the characteristic full honeycomb mesh that we find on stacker cases or rather half cases excuse me because it's all about the high air flow. Also we've got our I.O. so we have two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, headphone, microphone ports as well as a power switch just like that. And then on the left hand side panel we find a nice tinted window. I'm liking that actually. It looks quite sharp. I'm a bit of a fan of the whole tinted window thing. I think they look really really good. And we're going to go ahead and slide that off to reveal the internals of the 925 which we will actually get back to. So now let's carry on to the 915R. This is the one that comes with the 935 so you get at least two modules. Now this does not have feet on the bottom of it but what it does have is it has a case top piece. So you can see the way it's intended to be used out of the box is with this one with feet on the bottom on the rails, this one with no feet on the bottom on the rails, and this one stacked on top of this one a little something like this. Just like that. You put four screws in, one, two, three, four on either side and you have yourself one handy dandy monstrosity of a massive case here. Now that's not to say that that's the only way you can do it. You saw me removing screws from the top of the 915R just a second ago and I'm going to just finish doing that and show you guys the other option that's available to you. So I'm just going to pull out this last screw here. So feet, lids, and other cases all use the same modular interface so that they can be swapped around. So there, right there, is a nice included honeycomb ventilation thing as well as a dust filter. I meant the included dust filter, of course, a top panel is included with a top panel. That's not really sort of a thing. But anyway, this gives us our first look inside the 915R where it now is pretty much empty. Okay, this side panel also has a nice included dust filter. So you can go ahead and check that out. And integrated radiator mounting. So that leads us to the first real use of these 915 units and that is as a dedicated rad box. You could actually do two 280mm radiators in push-pull or two 360mm radiators in push-pull. Throw those on the side panels here and be pretty much ready to rock. So the R also comes with three, three and a half or two and a half inch drive mounting points as well as a five and a quarter inch drive mounting point which you can see through the top up here because that's about the only way we're going to reach it. Also, you can see that it has an MITX motherboard tray and a power supply mount at the back. And MITX cutout as well as a spot for a dual slot graphics card. So this could be a full MITX system or it could just hold radiators or it could just hold drives. In fact, what you'll notice up here is that in addition to these bays right here, there are mounting points for two more of them. So we could pull the drive cages out of the bottom for improved airflow to our graphics cards here. Throw those up here and put all of our drives up in the top. Routing power to them isn't as much of a problem as you might think because you can just use splitters once you get up there. But mounting SATA from your motherboard might be a little bit of a challenge. The good news though is that there are at least four different places where you can bring them through so that you can get access to all the different drives with all the different SATA cables. All right. So that leads me to where I was heading with my explanation, further explanation of the modular interface. And that is here. So if we wanted to, we could go, you know what, I just want like, you know, I just want, you know, two systems. I just want two cases. So I'm just going to use a 925 on its own and I'm going to use the 915 as like a bare bones skeleton. I'm going to put like, you know, a secondary little storage server in it or something. You can totally do that right out of the box. You can install two systems in it. The one challenge is that this guy does not include the front I.O. by default. You can pick that up as an aftermarket option from Cooler Master. So there is that. All right. So let's finish up our tour of the internals of the 925 before we continue to move along here with this very, very complicated case. All right. So inside here, we find those two three and a half inch bays that I mentioned before. So those can hold either two and a half inch SSDs or three and a half inch drives. We also have another SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray. You can actually see how that's going to be installed there, but don't worry, we'll take off that other side panel and show that to you guys. These are fully removable. Unfortunately, these cannot be relocated here, which would have been quite nice. That would have given us some additional options in terms of cable routing and all that. We have two less five and a quarter inch bays up here in the top right corner, as well as a pretty actually pretty good number of different sort of rubber grommet options. The one challenge here again is that there's actually less than an inch of space behind here. So make sure your cable management is tight, otherwise you might have a little bit of difficulty closing that other side panel. All right. We've got a bottom mounted power supply as well as a seven plus one configuration for the PCI slot. So you could install an XLATX motherboard if you wanted. Rather, there's an eight plus one configuration. So you could go XLATX here. You could put something like a fan controller there in terms of included fans for a half series case. I'd say the included fans aren't that impressive, but we've got a 140 millimeter at the back. And then I believe there is nothing at the front in this particular one. But then there is. I think it's an 80 millimeter fan or something like that. Yeah, that's an 80 millimeter fan in the top one. So it has options for fan mounting, but not a ton of fans included. But when you consider the price, I'd say that's that's actually pretty pretty reasonable. All right. So I'll show you guys those fan options that I was trying to get at before. You just got to pop these tabs out from the inside and you can pop the whole front off like that. So you can throw a couple more 120 millimeter fans here. You'll get better airflow out of these. Obviously, though, if you remove those drive caddies and throw them up into the included 915R, that is definitely going to be my recommended configuration for this case. So let's go ahead and check out that back panel, which I alluded to before, but haven't actually shown you yet. So there's that SSD mount in the middle as well as a little bit of room for cable management. But again, really not as much as I'd like, especially given the way that you're going to want to run cables over here. If you do mount your hard drives here, but of course, you do have the option of running up through the top of the case and through the bottom of the case, depending on where you keep your stuff. In fact, I think probably my recommended configuration out of the box, if you're not liquid cooling, would be take all your hard drives, chuck them down below, run everything down here and then down here from your power supply and then have nice open airflow for your for your gaming system component. All right. So this is the 915F. This is the one that's available as an aftermarket option. You can see that it comes with both a top piece and with feet. So that means it can be used as a standalone case, unlike the other two, which do not come with all the pieces that you'd actually need to use them each individually. And it also has a bit of a bit of a smarter layout in terms of if you were to use it as a standalone case. So rather than, you know, having a bunch of mounts for three and a half inch drives, for example, where it's really just meant to be overflow space for radiators and drives or whatever else for a different case, it has its drive mounts kind of spread around. And then it has a configuration that allows for a bit of a bigger CPU cooler, for example. The 915R that's included. Oh, it has the same radiator mounts, though. So you could still just use it as a rad box through radiators on the side. So you can see here in the included one, the R, your power supply goes at the back. That's what the R is for, rear mounted power supply. And there's really not much clearance for a CPU cooler here. So you could install a full system in there, but it's really not intended for you to do that. Whereas this one, the power supply actually goes way over here in the front. So they have a removable dust filter right here below it. And then you've got your exhaust out the front of the case right up here. And then you've got an extension cable that runs to your power supply from the back of the case so that you don't have to plug your power directly into the front of your case. You've also got a five and a quarter inch bay up here that includes, on the bottom here, hopefully I can get you guys a good angle of that, three and a half inch and two and a half inch mounting holes. You have another set of three and a half inch and two and a half inch mounting holes down here on the bottom. And then you have a third set here on this cross brace. So you can put a total of three three and a half inch or three two and a half inch drives. Or of course, if you install an optical drive, then you will be missing that option. What we also find here is that optional accessory that's available for the other one with front I.O. So USB 3 audio as well as a power switch. Now airflow inside this guy isn't really that optimal. It was more of an afterthought. You know, hey, why don't we make this available as a standalone case as well as as an upgrade module to the half stacker? Because it's really not necessarily the best ITX case in the world. It just happens to be a part of what is the biggest, most versatile liquid cooling and or storage case for gamers that that's pretty much out there. So you've got more rubber grommets for I just knocked that one out. Oops. More rubber grommets for pass through as well as some other things for pass through. And then I guess those same mounting holes. So we could put three three and a half inch cages in here and run an additional nine drives out of this one as well as in the other one. So there it is, guys. That is what Cooler Master internally refers to as the half stacker nine forty five. A nine fifteen are a nine fifteen F and a nine twenty five. Many of these parts modular, these side panels can be moved around. You can see we actually ended up with some extra modular parts when we assembled the case. We've got two extra sets of feet and an extra top. So if we bought another nine twenty five, we could get a full additional ITX case and a full additional ATX case out of the deal. So that's that's actually something to consider. That's one large case and then one medium and one small case for what would effectively be, I guess, just around four hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred dollars or something like that. That's not bad. So I'm going to spend probably the rest of this video. I'm going to take these apart again and talk about the possibilities of of building in here. Some of what Cooler Master thinks people might do with it and some then some of what I realistically think people actually might do with it because frankly some of their ideas are not very good. One of the ideas they had was, oh, you could use it for crypto coin mining. And I'm like, well, no, because you wouldn't use a mini ITX system for crypto coin mining because you could only have one GPU in it. And particularly if you're mining lite coins, then you're going to need lots of GPUs. And then even if you're mining bitcoins, you're going to need dedicated folding cards anyway. And so you'll need PCI expansion slots. And it doesn't really have that. But where I see this being useful is more like I thought one interesting scenario was Render Farm. So if you wanted to have your your render, your rendering offload machine actually like straps to your main video editing PC. Another interesting use case scenario that I see is lots of storage. If you really want a ton of storage in your PC, you could actually run three cages here, three cages here. So that would be a total of 18 drives between these two. You could run another six here, which would be a total of 24 drives. And all of that would fit in a chassis that all these pieces combined is less than two hundred and fifty dollars. So, you know, you could look at it and you go, oh, well, you could get like a Norco 24 Bay, you know, for you case for that money. It would take up less space, but you would be paying a lot more for that's about five hundred dollars. Also, the three and a half inch drive sleds are quite excellent. So you just release the clip on the back, pull it wide and then without doing any bending like we've seen in a lot of other games. And a lot of recent drive sleds. It's also quite solid. You can go ahead, attach your drive and then slide that in. It feels good even without a drive installed in it. And I think Cooler Master was actually the first one to to implement the whole super flimsy drive cages, but that are really firm once you get a drive in them. But now they've gone away from that anyway. Another scenario that I see people using this for is very extreme liquid cooling. So being able to put dual three sixties up here, dual three sixties down here in the bottom, run all your tubing in between using all these convenient holes where you can actually it's like it feels like a magic trick, right? It's like, oh, I put my hand in this computer. It comes out in this computer. Holy crap. Being able to put that much liquid cooling horsepower into something that costs again about two hundred and fifty dollars where comparably if you wanted something that fits, you know, four radiators, you'd be looking at something from Mountain Mods where it's a key case. And some people will like the height here where instead of having to compromise that much of your floor space or that much of your decks, desk space, you can have it be vertically stacked, get it stacks, stacker and have it not take up at least as much square footage of the actual space that it sits on. So being able to fit a ton of liquid cooling into something this inexpensive and that takes up this much. This little floor space is quite impressive as well. One of the other things they talk about is having your having a dedicated game server. So if you land a lot, for example, you can have a dedicated game server machine sitting up here on a little mini ITX board. Also throw some extra three and a half inch expansion out there. You know, take one of these out, get some extra airflow to your graphics card. That's a very realistic one. Having, you know, an alternate gaming rig while your main one is editing, I didn't think was that realistic because I thought my way the other way around would be better because then you don't necessarily have a full blown gaming GPU up here that just sits there doing nothing most of the time. So in conclusion, this really isn't my cup of tea. If you guys have been following me for any period of time, I mean, I kind of looked at this when Cooler Master unveiled it at PAX and I kind of went, OK, for the six people who are interested in that, fine. But I didn't really get a chance to look at it that closely and I didn't really get to examine the overall build quality of it that much at the time. I think I understand a little bit better. It's still not for me. I prefer more like clean lines and plain, a plain aesthetic, whereas half has never really been about that. It's been about an edgy outward appearance and airflow above all else, cooling and flexibility. And then the stacker of DNA comes in here with, well, stacking and lots and lots of hardware. And it's just it's not for me. I prefer having an offloaded raid box that sits in another room and I don't have to look at or listen to. But I definitely see the value. So for people looking for that value oriented water cooling case or that value oriented storage optimized case, this really is pretty much as good as it gets for either of those things. It's also built better than I thought. The one that I saw was pre-production and it really wasn't that impressive. This one is quite solid. I would feel confident even once it's full of hardware having three full systems in here, which you could actually do. And while I'd probably want it against the desk or something on one side, it's really not that bad. And I'm extremely impressed. I think that's pretty much it. Oh, yeah. Real user reviews. I have the benefit now of reading reviews from people who actually own the thing and paid their own money for it. And they're all extremely positive. So I think the people who know they want this, guys, just buy it. You're going to be happy with it. For the people who know that this is not for them like me. Well, guys, you're probably not going to be happy with it. So don't force yourself. One last thing that I thought I'd include, since this is hilarious, is in this configuration has support for three full power supplies. So you could put one down here at the front. You could put one here in the middle on the bottom of the middle one and you could put one up here in the top. So if you did want to use the middle tower, for example, for Litecoin mining, then at least you'd have all the power that you needed. You could split it across three different power supplies. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Kuaimaster half stacker. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. And let me know in the comments, are you a stacker person or are you not a stacker person? Because I think there's only two kinds of people in this world, stacker people and not stacker people.