well hello the people look with just a ride fred is already on this guy
the Inwin a1 you see I love me a good quality ITX enclosure hopefully this is
one of them let's unbox Wow so that thing is looking pretty sweet let me
show you through view
all right so now that's out of the way I know you guys like and of course I do
too my take of b-roll but in this video I won't talk about five reasons of why I
love ITX and why that low a one is replacing my
current large tower so let me tell you why I love ITX so much right after this
the new masterkeys MK750 keyboard comes with a comfortable magnetic wrist
rest beautiful RGB light bar on the perimeter
and perky lighting control with a variety of Cherry MX switches and the
bottom type-c connection Cooler master doing it right check it out the low so
the first obvious advantage with ITX is size don't get me wrong I love my PCO11
dynamic it's a beautiful you know glass enclosure I can fit a lot of
things in there but it requires its own little pedestal so it's kind of on the
same level as my desk but look at this guy he's tiny and you can definitely put
it on the desk itself and not occupy another piece of furniture so relocating
this case is really not an issue if you decide to move it around a little bit in
your space plus you can potentially put it in some form of a duffel bag if
you're going to a LAN event or just want to carry this thing wherever you go and
for size comparison here's the H500i from NZXT the latest mint
tower this thing is pretty compact but look at
how much smaller the a1 is here's the GPU right next to it for a little size
reference this has a glass top which is awesome so you can accessorize obviously
the perfect space for Fred and by the way the glass top has a Qi charger
built-in which is awesome so you can charge your smartphone or and in my case
I can charge my mouse on top of the case a really unique feature for the a1
reason number two potentially the less obvious one aside from the much smaller
form factor would be the unique designs that we have with ITX cases for example
take the shift X from Phanteks are really unique towering ITX case make sure to
check out our review over here the Ncase m1 is a really popular format the new
streacom da2 that we checked out the Computex that's a really unique one here
and the a1 sort of fits within that same formula of being compact space efficient
and doesn't have any hardware compromises in terms of what you can
in terms of GPU some storage and cooling there is a lot of happening with the a1
in terms of design so like the curvature of the front panel
different materials you know that transparent section the bottom is not
something that we have seen but the only thing that kind of stands out to me is
the in wind text at the front it's not my thing but at least it's not too
intrusive whereas with ATX case designs they all
feel too similar to each other so there is less differentiation in the ATX space
versus what you can get with ITX which brings me to my third point and that is
size does not matter for powerful hardware you can still have an
incredibly powerful and capable machine without it occupying much space and to
prove that point I'm going to relocate my main system from this giant full
tower into the tiny a1 without changing any of my main hardware components so
that is an 8600K inside this ITX motherboard I have had no issues
overclocking into 5 gigahertz which is awesome
the titanic's piece again going here the m-dot to drive which is my OS drive is
gonna go underneath this heatsink and I have three other snow SSD's which is
perfect because this motherboard has four SATA connections the only thing
that's different will be memory capacity which is cut in half because I only have
two RAM slots instead of 4 but still 32 gigs of ram is totally fine in some
aspects this motherboard is far superior versus my z370 ATX prime because this
one has a type C front IO connection and a 5 volt addressable RGB header which is
perfect for this case it also has built-in Wi-Fi excellent so now that the
system swap assembly into the a1 begin
so there she is fully assembled everything's working fine which brings
me to my fourth point the satisfaction of building something like this because
you know it's more challenging everything is more cramped there's less
space to work with you have to approach it from like a strategic point of view
and when you're routing the 24 pin cable the 8 pin cable for example here I had
to insert the CPU tower after the motherboard that all the cables were pre
routed because otherwise it would just not fit and so you kind of have to go
around a certain way to work around the limitations of such a tiny space but in
the end if you're doing it the right way it is super rewarding
now the underglow of this skirt is actually pretty cool as long as you have
a 12 volt RGB header on your motherboard otherwise it's just simply blue if you
power it via eSATA now the a1 comes with a built-in 600 watt bronze certified
power supply so it's not that efficient but 600 watts should be enough for my
system the thing is it only has three SATA connections so for my three SSD's
that's fine but the lighting control here also requires SATA power so just
keep that in mind and check this out there is this plastic cover that goes
over the cable exit hiding that stuff really nice but it isn't physically
attached the power supply via a screw so if you were to replace the power supply
maybe pop in your SFX or another ATX power supply in here you will not be
able to install the bracket back so be nice if this thing was installed to the
frame and not on the power supply itself now this whole situation where the power
supply cover is unfortunate because this is a terrible design and when come on
because you have to slide it from the side but that's where my CPU tower is
you know be nice if this was just like a little clip on from the top you don't
have to worry about like passing any cables to it really bad because I cannot
install this now and you can see the cables exiting from the power supply now
I will say I'm pretty proud of my cable management job you know nothing is
sticking out the front so there is no restrictions for air flow and like I can
remove components without cabling being on the way but I'm also pretty happy at
the cable management job at the back so both us as these are connected and you
know no cabling is sticking out so I can close the panel nope
but now you may be thinking hey Dmitri what's up with the airflow
you went from a 360 all-in-one cooler and potential to install six more fans
inside the Leonie case to something like that where you have one intake fan from
the side and just the CPU tower fan doing all the exhaust for you and that
brings me to my fifth point of why I love ITX if configured correctly for
airflow you're looking at less volume of air that needs to be replaced every
second and therefore you don't need to cram that enclosure with so many fans
because one intake from the side and one exhaust will definitely do the trick for
cooling with my CPU tower that does a pretty decent job at 5 gigahertz on the
CPU and the GPU is thing pretty nice and cool too and the only real compromise I
have with my ITX motherboard is that I only have two fan headers which means
that I cannot connect more fans without splitters which I don't have but I would
potentially install one intake at the bottom to deliver a cool air for the GPU
and one additional exhaust vent at the back so that you can create this nice
channel of airflow and these the fans are super quiet anyway so I wouldn't
worry about noise now sure in mid towers you have more radiator space and space
for fans and just general emptiness inside the enclosure so things can feel
like you know you're not crammed in but with a proper set up in a tiny space
you're looking at the same temperatures if not better alright so those are all
my reasons of why I love ITX and potentially encourage you guys to move
into that direction because you know there is some challenge that is involved
in working with such tight quarters but it is a rewarding experience as long as
you approach it from that mentality it's not like a giant food tower where you
have a lot of space to maneuver you know it's a it's a compact space and you have
to approach it accordingly now the one split point one comes to ITX systems art
visuals you know it's not really about how the hardware looks on the inside
instead it's all about the exterior visuals so I'm using the Titanic speed
the collector's edition it looks beautiful but it's almost semi wasted on
the interior because you can't see it and so I was gonna use the T-Force Teamgroup
memory the knighthawk because the lighting on here is fantastic plus
this is a white module so it kind of fits in with the white theme of the case
and the silver motherboard majority of the time with ITX you'll have to steer
away from beautiful hardware into something that there's just functional
and non visible and by the way you can check out the teamgroup memory down the
description below now aside from having fewer fan headers on the motherboard
because of ITX for this case in particular we only have
two USB ports on the i/o which is fine for ITX but that is one of the
advantages of larger mid towers and full towers that normally come with four but
I would say the main deterrent or the disadvantage when it comes to ITX for
most people would be price regardless of the difficulty of working and something
like this this Z370 motherboard inside there is more expensive than my z370
ATX Prime motherboard which is you know definitely more future-proof more
expansion stuff so yeah but aside from more expensive hardware you're also
looking at more expensive enclosure so this one sells for $169 and while it has
that unique underglow and just the entire format that's pretty cool plus
the Qi charger the power supply built in you know it's more expensive than my Lian Li
Enclosure and I love this thing it's also quite unique or the H500 for example
the new ones from NZXT that thing is 79 or 69 bucks and sure it's much larger
but the experience I would say is definitely a lot more pleasing to most
people but yeah that is what you have to deal with when you go towards the ITX
route I don't know maybe we should call it the Mini ITX tax because all the
hardware is generally more expensive you know the process of assembly is more
difficult however you can't ignore the fact that it's much smaller and the end
result is rewarding satisfying at least to me I don't know what about you
alright good people so those are my five reasons why I love ITX
perhaps you should try the same direction as well pretty happy how this
turned out you know I'm keeping all the same hardware as I have on mid towers
that I've had that are what at least three times in volume and the
cooling capacity in here with just two fans is actually pretty awesome and so
let me know if you're also considering downsizing because it's not bad at all
join the wireless club with Corsair's new dark core Mouse play the way you want
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make sure to check out this other relevant content links for parts are in
the description below if you're interested in anything that we've shown
here today I'm a Dmitry we'll see you in the next video it probably a full Tower
if I look into my crystal ball