 Welcome to my unboxing of the BitFenix Merc. This is the... Hold on, there's two versions. There's the alpha with the window, and then there's the beta which does not. Wait, hold on. Now I'm confused. Well we have the alpha, so we're going to find out exactly what that is once we get it opened up. BitFenix has been releasing a number of fairly interesting cases. One of the things that really sets them apart from their competition is their soft feel or soft touch finish, which basically feels, instead of like a painted metal or like plastic, feels kind of like a velvety, velvety soft plastic. And I don't know how to describe it other than, you know high end gaming mice? How they often have like a bit of a rubberized or like a soft grip to them. It's kind of like that. And at some point, the case comes out of the box, and at that point in time, and no sooner, we can take a closer look at it. So value gaming cases. Ouch. That shocked me. Value gaming cases are no new thing for BitFenix. We had a look at the Outlaw a little while ago, which was kind of cool because it used that altered ATX style, and it was, as far as I can tell, the least expensive case to ever use that design. So here we go with the Merc. So aha, the alpha has the cooling panel on the side. So this basically does not look like we can mount a 120 millimeter fan, but I wouldn't be that surprised if you could kind of like jigger it to work. So hold on a second. Let's just grab a fan that doesn't have a... Here we go. So let's see. It looks like it does line up. Yeah, so you can just use the outside holes here in order to screw a fan in if you really wanted to. Cool. Okay. Maybe they intended that. Surely they intended that. They call it a cooling side panel. So the alpha has cooling side panel, two by one, 20 millimeter optional. See, I haven't come up with anything new here. So on the top, we've got dual 120 millimeter fans as well, and then on the back, we have an additional 120 millimeter fan. You can also mount a 92 or an 80 millimeter fan on the back should you see fit. A couple water cooling holes. We've got seven expansion slots in this particular case. So you're gonna be fitting standard ATX motherboards only in here. Let's have a closer look at the front before we get any further. Actually, this case does not have soft touch. So this is meant to be more of a straight value case. We've got a three and a half inch expansion bay, three five and a quarter inch expansion bays, mesh at the front here. And on the top, we have four USB 2.0 microphone, headphones, power, and reset switches. So let's go ahead and take the side panel off here, which hopefully I can do. Ah, there we go. It comes out this way. Okay. We've got our front panel connectors. These are all covered in a black heat shrink and then here heat shrink at the end and then just a black sleeving. So we've got our HD audio. We've got two USB front panel connectors. And then last but not least, we've got our front power, reset switch, hard drive, LEDs, and all that good stuff. Inside layout doesn't look like really much of anything too, too different from what we've seen in the past from a variety of different cases. So hard drive wise, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven three and a half inch hard drives. We've got another 120 millimeter fan here in the bottom. So in terms of cooling, there's a fair number of options that are available to you. I'm just going to go ahead and pull this out. So there are two 120 millimeter cooling fan positions in the front. And if you go ahead and squeeze these together, it comes out a lot more easily, I suspect. Oh, interesting. Having a bit of trouble here. Give me a sec, guys. Got it, guys. I just had to heave on it a little bit. So we've got two 120 millimeter cooling fans here in the front. Looks like you can also mount 92s if you so desire. So you can use those to cool your drives. Here you can see the inside of the case as a whole. So there's the interface for the front panel, what nots. But I can't really think of any good reason why you'd... There we go. Going to disconnect those, so just leave those attached. What else we got here? CPU cutout is right here. So it's a fairly small CPU cutout, but as long as your CPU socket isn't sort of more to the right, then you shouldn't have too much trouble reaching a backplate CPU cooler and replacing it without actually removing the motherboard from the case. I guess there's not too much else to say. Bottom mounted power supply. 120 millimeter fan here. Two 120s in the front. All black interior, which may or may not matter to you because you can see inside the case a little bit, but it's going to be less if you actually mount fans here. So there, that should give you guys some idea of how much you can actually see down into the case. So I do like the all black interiors, but I'm personally more inclined to say it's necessary if you do have a side panel window. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the BitFenix Merc. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.