 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at what should be fairly evident based on the outside of the box. This is the Half XB from Cooler Master, which is a continuation of the ever popular Half Series. So it started with the Half 932, which was an ATX mid-tower that offered extreme airflow for the price and for the form factor. I mean the whole thing was basically like mesh and fans and making sure that all your system components stayed cool. Then we saw the lower cost Half 922, then I believe we saw the Half X, then the Half 912. Now we have a half cube case. Now cube cases are more common with some of these sort of boutiquey case guys. We've seen a cube from Lee and Lee, we've seen cubes from Mountain Mods and Case Labs over the years. But most of the mainstream guys don't really do cubes, so I'm really excited to see what sort of a more experienced case maker like Cooler Master can do with this form factor. The cube form factor is sort of unique because what it does do is it gives a lot of room that you normally don't find in an enclosure above and potentially below the motherboard. Because the motherboard usually takes up a lot of space inside the case, not because it is actually physically large. I mean a motherboard is thin, but it takes up a lot of space inside the chassis because you can't really put anything over top of it. It's just sort of full. So what you can do by lying the motherboard down flat is you can get access to sort of unique ways to use the space. So first we see the packing material, so you got about an inch and then a little more than an inch on the sides. And I mean honestly for a pretty, this is a pretty light case considering its size and the steel construction, it feels very, very sturdy. Like you could probably, yeah, just put all your weight on this thing. I mean like I said, an experienced case maker like Cooler Master, you don't expect them to make any new bearers like it being kind of flimsy like you see with Mountain Mods enclosures. So those are all aluminum which is harder to make more rugged and more strong. So the first thing we're going to do is get all these panels unscrewed. Actually not quite all of them because I want to show you the outside first. So on the side you find ventilation. You expect that from a half series enclosure. You also find handy dandy handles that can be used for carrying the case around and you can use to maneuver it quite easily. These are not levers, so you don't pull up on these to open up the side panel. The side panel is removed by removing the screws and then sliding it back. So those are just for airflow and for handling the case. The other side is identical. Same thing, you got handles, you got airflow holes, so nothing that you haven't seen before like 10 seconds ago. All right, on the back we've got a 120 mil fan, more ventilation, again as we've come to expect, two 80 mil fans, standard seven PCI slots as well as what appears to be a cable tie and a protruded power supply mounting cage. So what that does is that gives us more room inside the case for things like cable management because remember your power supply is going to be like this long and then you're going to have a bunch of more space on the end for where the cables need to come out. So by doing this, case manufacturers instead of making their entire chassis another inch deeper can just protrude the power supply a little bit and I guess sort of cheat, give you a smaller enclosure that way with just a little bit of a bump out the back. In the top you see what appears to be a 200 mil fan mounting, fan mounting spacing with rubber grommets and what is a very see through mesh. So while I like to see windows to see into my chassis and see what you know the cool elite stuff that I put in there, I don't mind a thin mesh like this because you can, as you can, here, as you can see, you can see through it quite clearly so you'll get a very good aesthetic even though it's not using a window. On the front of the case we've got two 120 mil fans with more mesh, two 5.25 inch bays, two hot swap 3.5 inch drive sleds which are really cool because here, check this out, they're compatible with 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch so this is that standard rubberized grommet mount thing that we've seen with Cooler Master in the past, you can put a 2.5 inch drive in using these holes, more ventilation on the drive cage itself and instead of bending it like we used to, you actually just slide it open and then clip it into place just like that with a drive on it. This allows it to be a lot more sturdy whereas on those other ones, like I know I've commented on this a lot in the past where I say, yeah it looks really flimsy, once you put a drive in it it's okay, now I no longer have to say that, it just doesn't look flimsy and once you put a drive in it it should be that much more okay so those lock into place quite nicely. You've also got your front power reset, power LED, you've got, hold on, nope, power LED is the illuminated button here, that's your hard drive activity LED, microphone, headphone and two USB 3 ports, USB 3 is finally standard on pretty much every single new case which is great, I remember it was so frustrating for so long, half the chassis didn't have USB 3, the other half of them had it but with a pass through that plugged into the back of your motherboard. So in order to put together your half XB you're going to want to, oh look at that, wow, considering the price of this case that is a very, very solid side panel, I mean that's the thing, again guys like Cooler Master they do not screw around when it comes to the overall build quality of the case, so even though it's pretty light it's not like they're using lightweight material, I mean look at this, they've punched out most of this panel but it still has only this much flex to it and I'm putting a lot of force on it, you can see from, yep, nope, still good, yeah you can see how much force I'm putting on it, it does not bend at all, extremely rigid, love to see that because it just means that there's going to be less strain on the components if anything does happen if you're shipping the system which is a concern if you're a system builder like NCIX, you know you look at it and you go oh well, you know, hmm that's going to put a lot of strain on the motherboard when that case flexes like that, not going to have that happen with a well built chassis. So in terms of included accessories you've got tons of cable management ties, this is way more than I'm used to seeing with a case, you have a whole whack load of 2.5 inch drive sleds and I'll show you where these go in a minute, included speaker as well as all the screws you'll need to assemble your system. So once we get inside let's start on this side, check this out, dedicated 2.5 inch drive mounting, so with those two front hot swaps you can mount up to six SSDs in this case completely natively, all you do is throw your SSDs in the little rails, slide them in and it's pretty much what you're used to seeing in terms of hard drive mounting except it's an entire dedicated 2.5 inch cage and again extremely well built. At the back of the case remember those two 80 mil fans, those are going to be directly cooling your SSDs here and honestly I probably wouldn't install anything here, I'd just use them as passive air flow. The 5.25 inch bays are completely tool-less so you open them up, lock them just like that and you can remove them very easily and this is a design we've seen on the half series before just by folding back these little tabs which don't even look like a tab, they're very well integrated into the aesthetic design of the case which is very industrial and then you use the tool-less mounting in order to throw your 5.25 inch drive in there, lots of space at the back for longer optical drives and cable management. Speaking of cable management, there are tons of cable management options in this case, check this out, cable management loops here, I love these things, they're awesome, they help you keep things tidy, look at all the cable management loops that they've popped into the bottom here so you can see those here, all the cables that need to be, they've even put in dedicated cable management loops for these fans at the back so you can go cable here, tie it down here, tie it down there and get everything over to the power supply area where you can see more cable management loops, more cable management loops, the interface for the hot swap 3.5 inch drive bays in the front, so single molex power, then you run two SATA data cables in order to activate those, you've got noise dampening foam so this is under the power supply as well as a removable filter that goes under the power supply itself. They've also lifted the power supply up a little bit and I'm glad to see that because I recently had a power supply die in an older Define R2 case from Fractal, this was totally my bad but what I did is I put a 120mm fan power supply in it, fanned down and then I put the case onto a carpeted area, yeah that thing died, it totally starved from airflow, I didn't even think about it as I was kind of throwing it under a desk and not thinking, I was just thinking of it as a file server, so this would have saved my power supply right here because even though it wouldn't have been optimal, it would have been able to grab some air from the inside of the case by bringing it up through these gaps so it wouldn't have completely suffocated, so that would have saved my bacon. Let's move up into the top of the chassis where we'll find a couple cool things, so number one is the removable motherboard tray which you can take off just by removing four screws here and lifting the whole motherboard tray out, that will make it easier to cable manage the bottom of the case as well as install all your components outside of the case and then put them in, personally I'd probably try and do it without it because yeah my hands are pretty small but I can handle it, if you have larger hands though that could be a boon for you, huge CPU cut out so you'll have no problems installing the back plates of larger CPU coolers, even when everything is still in the chassis, even when the motherboard is already installed on the motherboard tray, you can see also that those front 120mm fans also have 140mm fan mounts and the spacing looks right for a radiator which is outstanding because you can put a dual 120mm radiator here, looks like you can pretty easily fit, ah yes, you can easily fit another 120mm radiator here that looks like enough spacing so you can have at least a triple radiator water cooling setup in here with no problems at all, aesthetics are awesome, I mean if you're going to have that nice loose mesh on the top so you can see everything inside the case then you better make sure you're including things with black cables, so black cabled fans that are either 3 pin or mole x, another black cabled fan and all black cables for the front panel connectors including the audio, the power and the LEDs, the USB 3 as well as, yeah that's pretty much it, hold on a second, here's something cool guys, check this out, with a little bit of modding you could install a 7 PCI slot motherboard but you could install a dual slot card in the very bottom, this is a big deal if you want to do sort of massive SLI configurations as some boards don't have the correct spacing to put your last dual slot card here because it just doesn't really work that way so check this out, you can put it here and then all you'd have to do, it's right here you see, put your side panel on, you can see the card's going to get lots of ventilation through these holes right over here so no problems there so all you'd have to do is in order to use the rear exhaust on your card, potentially if you have a rear exhaust card, is I'd probably you know dremel some holes kind of here so that you can get access to that air flow so very cool stuff but Crazy Russian spotted that he's guest helping me film today so kudos to him for noticing that, that's awesome and I think that actually pretty much covers it, I just want to show you guys yet more cable management loops right here and here above the 5.25 inch and the 3.5 inch cages I guess if I had one thing to caution you guys about before buying this case is make sure that you have an external storage solution because it only really supports two 3.5 inch drives other than that this guy is completely ready for SSD more than anything else thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Half XB from Cooler Master don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Here's something I didn't notice until we were putting the case back together but check this out so those super sturdy plastic handles I showed you on the outside are actually reinforced by this piece of metal here that's part of why they're so strong and they're not going anywhere because you're picking up the chassis by the actual chassis not by a piece of plastic that's attached to the side panel which is attached to the chassis good stuff again just great design choices overall on this case.