 So today we have an exciting new product to talk about. This is the Cooler Master Half X and really this comes down to a complaint that I've had for quite a while with EVGA and their overly long motherboards. They've been releasing motherboards like their classified 4-way SLI, their new SR2 super record 2 dual slot, sorry, dual socket LGA 1366 motherboard. They've been releasing motherboards with too many PCI slots. They're actually longer than a standard case which is 7 PCI slots. Now the Half X fixes that complaint that I've had that they're releasing these motherboards that there are no cases for. Well now we have a case for it. So let's have a look at the overall specs of this before we take it out of the box. It is a black case. It is made of steel and plastic. There's a bunch of boring stuff. Now something that they have seemed to have forgotten here is that it is micro ATX, ATX, EATX and it is also something called XLATX which is kind of an ATX that is too long because if we come down here PCI slots 9. So rather than having a standard 7 PCI slots, this case can accept either motherboards with 8 slots and then an overhanging dual slot card in the bottom slot or even a motherboard with 9 PCI slots. So 2 too long like the classified 4-way. Okay so cooling system. This is probably relevant. Included we have a 230 millimeter red LED fan at the front, a 200 to 200 millimeter fans at the top. Oh one is optional. Okay so only one. A 200 millimeter fan at the side and a 140 millimeter fan at the rear. There's apparently also a 120 millimeter fan which is a VGA fan cover and then a VGA holder has an optional 80 millimeter fan. So one of the big features of the Half X is actually also that it is Fermi ready. So it is ready for Nvidia's latest GTX 470 and 480 graphics cards. That means it has really good GPU cooling. That kind of goes without saying. Okay we got an installation guide here. So this is going to tell you how to install your components in the system. I'll actually just let you read that. You can freeze the frame if you want to figure out. Oh this is neat. USB 3.0 converting to USB 2.0 calba. I'm sure they mean cable but that's a that's a pretty useful thing to know how to do, how to install the VGA bracket. Okay we can kind of refer to this a little bit later and then let's get the case out. Let's have a look at it. The first thing I noticed about it is that it is black. Black everywhere. Black on the inside, black on the back, black on the top, on the front. Very nice. That is what I like to see for almost any case these days. It's a nice black interior matched with a black exterior. Black goes with everything. It's the new black. We've got a plane flying overhead so I don't know how well you're going to be able to hear me. But let's get all these plastic bits off and have a look at this case. So Cooler Master's half line of cases is all about half. High air flow. So we'll start at the front. The entire front of the case is covered in grills. So all of this is potentially if you've got a lot of exhaust going to be passive intake and then down here we have I'm just going to use this as a cheat sheet. At the front we have our 230 millimeter red LED fan. Up at the front we've got all of our front connectivity. So they've got everything here. We have USB 3.0 super speed which you can convert to extra USB 2.0 ports. We've got eSATA, Firewire, USB 2.0 as well as front audio. So it has everything and then this panel actually looks like you might even be able to remove it and mount something else there. Maybe not. Okay here we've got a little slider. Okay so that has your fan LED button. That's pretty cool. Then a reset switch as well as a power switch so those can all be safely hidden for whatever reason. Just kind of kind of cool to have little things that slide around on the case like that. Okay the overall build of the thing actually I'm just gonna kind of see what I think of it. As soon as you fill up a case like this it's gonna be really heavy but it's also very very solid. Like you could easily put all of my weight on it even when it's empty and even though it has plastic to the construction because you can see the way that they've constructed the plastic is very rugged. It's very reinforced and it also has kind of a cool look to it. It's along the visual stylings of previous half cases but it doesn't take everything out of their book either. So let's take the side panel off. Side panel fit and finish is pretty good. Let me just kind of put it back on and see what I think of that because it's not perfect by any means but yeah it gets in there pretty good. So you can see even when we take it off and put it back on there are no unnecessary gaps in the case. Everything fits in really nice. That's something hey you can't actually take it for granted. So you just pull it away, pull it out, there we go. Let's have a look at the inside here. That is a hardcore looking fan and duct right there. So besides the window we've got this huge grill which you can actually remove the fan from but still leave the grill on so it'll still look pretty cool and you can actually remove this duct from the fan as well if you don't want that but this fan is designed to send as much airflow over the graphics cards as is humanly or fanly possible. You can see it can plug in either using a three pin connector or you can use the included four pin molex adapter. So we can go ahead and file this side panel away and have a look at some more aspects of this case. The interior. Once again it borrows a lot from previous half cases. So we've got Cooler Masters 3.5 inch or rather this one has an SSD adapter already included in it but I'm assuming yeah you can take that out. So they're 3.5 inch drive bays. Now these look really flimsy but as soon as you install a hard drive in them they're really really sturdy. So I love their hard drive mounting system personally. And then they've also gone and included a 2.5 inch adapter so if you have an SSD boot drive just right out of the box you can put a couple screws in it slide that into their convenient tool-less system and clip it in. Awesome. So it takes up to one two three four five three and a half inch bays here and then what appears to be a hot swap module in the front but we'll have a closer look at that later actually. I just want to have a look at the overall layout of the interior first. So down here this is the, oh they've got a little cool design by Cooler Masters stamp on here. This is going to hold your power supply. Alright so your power supply it goes into the bottom of this case and they don't have an option for a top mount which I don't think really matters. You've got little rubber, here where's my knife? Yeah I actually have a knife today check that out. Alright so why don't we sort of figure out how this works by removing this. Okay oh yeah this is interesting. This is the duct for the Nvidia Fermi graphics cards. This is part of what makes it Fermi ready because you're ducting dedicated airflow to the graphics cards using like kind of a segmented zone cooling paradigm that we first saw with the Ntech P180. Okay but you can actually remove this if you don't want it. If you don't like it you can just pull it out just like that. It's only two thumb screws so it's no big deal. Okay so then I'm gonna now that I've removed that I'm gonna go ahead and remove my power supply bracket here because honestly in a build that I'm doing I probably won't use any of this stuff. So while something like this power supply cover is great if you're not using a modular power supply because you can hide all the wires behind it if you are using a modular power supply you're probably just gonna pull it out anyway but I mean hey they think of everything right? So this box is probably all of our accessories that's strapped in just like that. You can see the way they've positioned the cooling holes here. There aren't actually any fan mounts on them but the reason for that is that they just wanted to have a nice open well supported place to put your power supply. So even if you have one of those ridiculously long power supplies I mean they can be up to this long you will have proper little rubber supports for it. You'll have your four screws at the back and you'll have the right ventilation spacing no matter where the fan on your power supply is. So that's pretty cool as well and let's see what else I want to talk about in the interior here. Right, right, why don't we just kind of cut right to the chase here. Here it is. This is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine PCI slots and here's an interesting thing there's actually room for another slot right here. So even if you have a nine slot motherboard you can even put a dual slot card in the last one and you're still not going to interfere with your power supply and there's going to be a spot to rest the card right in the case there. So that's pretty crazy. Okay then we've also got the cutout for the CPU cooler. Nice big cutout so pretty much no matter where your CPU is positioned you're going to be able to access the back plate. We've got our 140 millimeter fan at the back. We've got water cooling grommets here in case you wanted to do an external water cooling system. Now up at the top this is a little bit of a disappointment but the first one I've had about this case I don't actually see a convenient place to mount a radiator but that may just be because I'm not, I don't have a radiator here to kind of line up against it because something that I do see is that there are a lot of sort of extraneous looking mounting points in here so it's quite possible that they do have the holes there but I'm not seeing them so I wish yeah I wish I had a radiator to try it but I don't have one on me. There we go I just undid the other panel so let's have a quick look at that. On the inside we've got a bit of a sort of textured thing going on here. Now this is a smart thing that they've done. You see how this panel is not flat. There's actually quite a bit of bulge and rather than just sort of having this be flat and working the texture into this side what they've actually done is they've given you more room at the back of the motherboard tray to route all of your cables so with this kind of depth you can route you can route all of your PCI Express cables behind the video cards and then with this slightly less depth you can do the few cables required for the 8 pin around the back of the motherboard and your 24 pin so that's a really smart thing that they've worked right into the case they've made it look like just a design element but it's there for a very practical reason so that brings us around to the back where we've got oh these are nice actually we've got really really soft rubber grommets to mount all of our power search amount to route all of our power supply cables through so these are the kind that even if you have a cable sticking through it and and butting up against it it's still going to snap right back to its original place we have a nice big hole at the bottom because I mean in theory you're routing as many as eight PCI Express connectors through this a 24 pin and eight pin up to the back you're mounting like you're putting tons and tons of cables in here so it's great that they have a nice big hole for that okay we've got our five five and a quarter inch rather six five and a quarter inch bays these are all standard tooled affairs but personally I don't mind that some people will complain that they're not tool-less but I mean oh they are too list for ha for them are too list my dad and then the other two actually have the hot swap module mounted in them now I wish I could figure out how that works because it you know it may not actually be hot swap it might just be like a back plane thing although it looks like hot swap there's there's got to be a way to do this so just bear with me here I apologize for trying to figure this out on camera but no I don't really I do this all the time okay just take off the front bezel and see what we can see what we can discover at the back here or at the front rather behind the front there that's what I meant to say okay this is interesting I wonder if you actually have to take off the top as well as the front and cameraman's complaining to me about how long this video is so I guess we can well you know what I'll find out how those work and then I'll upload an annotation never mind I got it I got it there we go yes they are hot swap bays so I figured out how they work hold on let me pop the front bezel back in okay so you just take these two clips at either side push them in pull it out all you do is screw your drive in it'll accept two and a half inch or three and a half inch drives you can see into the back plane there so it accepts up to two drives so that brings the three and a half inch drive capacity up to a potential of seven as well as the two and a half inch drive capacity by default with this case up to three let's see what else I want to still cover what else do we got we talked about XLE so our camera cut off no big deal let's have a look at the front panel connectors here's our two USB 3.0 connectors and then so these are there's there's a guide in the in the user's manual for how to convert them to USB 2.0 so yeah I'm guessing there will be some way to do that we've got HD audio we've got a hard drive LED we've got our sort of standard power switch power LED reset switch all of those we've got our eSATA connection then we have our regular USB 2.0 front header and then we have our firewire front header so no matter what connectivity options your motherboard has you are going to be able to hook it up in this case I just wanted to quickly show the tool-less mechanism for the five and a quarter inch bays you just press the button it locks in the drive you press it again it unlocks the drive very straightforward okay now one thing that I totally forgot about while I was doing the last segment was the included accessories so what do we have in here oh we got wheels hey they really did think of everything with this case because I mean one of the things I said was oh it's kind of heavy there you go they put wheels on it oh here here we go so here's how to adapt the USB 3.0 cables to USB 2.0 headers all you do is this you plug this in here hide it somewhere in all of the oh no that doesn't work okay I have no idea interesting you know what I bet I can figure it out but it's not too hard I'm willing to yeah yeah I'm willing to wager that at the front of the case there's actually ports that you plug these into and then you just run a regular USB 2.0 header very nice okay we have an 8 pin extension cable like I said they thought of everything because a lot of motherboard or a lot of power supplies aren't gonna have a long enough 8 pin to account for those extra two slots of height so there you go they include one and this I think is something to do with the graphics card duct I believe it supports the graphics cards unless you're shipping the system around it's probably not a big deal but I think it kind of goes in like that or something okay and then last but not least we have a big baggie of screws mostly black screws all the ones you're gonna see are black nice little finishing touches like that black zip ties as well as a little speaker you can attach to your motherboard for diagnostic purposes thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Cooler Master Half X and don't forget to subscribe