BitFenix Prodigy Review: The Affordable Performable Mini-ITX
by Dustin Sklavos on June 1, 2012 1:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Mini ITX
- bitfenix
Noise and Thermal Testing
At the risk of spoiling the results (much like Anand loves to do), let me just say the BitFenix Prodigy performed well. Really well. Going into testing I wasn't entirely sure how it would handle given the substantial ventilation, but the Prodigy's performance, at least with our integrated GPU testbed, was pretty stellar. Testing was done with an ambient temperature of ~22C.
While the SSD's temperature isn't best in class, it's not bad by any stretch of the imagination. The CPU's thermals are quite good, though, especially considering the Prodigy is competing with the more expensive SilverStone FT03 Mini. The FT03 Mini's cooling design centered around a single 140mm fan is brutally efficient.
Notice that the heatsink fan isn't working as hard in the Prodigy, though. This could arguably be chalked up to the difference in ambient temperatures at testing, and certainly the FT03 Mini is no slouch, but there's much more ventilation around the CPU in the Prodigy than there is in the FT03 Mini and our results on the next page will show that it produces a measurable effect.
Most impressively, the Prodigy is incredibly quiet even under load, hitting the noise floor of our sound meter. To my ears I could detect a minor difference in fan noise between idle and load, but the Prodigy is really a remarkably good citizen when it comes to noise.
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Zoomer - Saturday, June 9, 2012 - link
They got IPOedNorseman4 - Saturday, June 2, 2012 - link
Currently it's nowhere, even us.ncix.com as listing the case as "not yet available", but you can pre-order. (Shipping mid June. 79.99 w/ free shipping)Additionally, NewEgg looks like they will carry it, since they have placeholders (out-of-stock, Image coming soon, that sort of thing) for both the blank and the white case. (Currently showing 79.99 w/ 15.88 shipping)
Other retailers may also carry it since the BitFenix site shows 9 resellers, but does not include the 'Egg
JarredWalton - Sunday, June 3, 2012 - link
While Newegg does a ton of enthusiast business, I'd say BitFenix would be happier to get their stuff on Amazon first. *Everyone* has heard of Amazon; Newegg is big, but not quite that big.Zoomer - Saturday, June 9, 2012 - link
They could just do that themselves right now by shipping a bunch to amazon under the fulfilled by amazon program.oDii - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
As someone who regrets building a WHS box in an fully populated Lian Li PC-Q08, this looks like they were so close to getting it right! Just needed one more 3.5" drive bay. To be honest, it looks like there's a decent amount of room between the drive bays, so I'm surprised they didn't just reduce that and increase the available bays...Dustin Sklavos - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
You need more than five? Theoretically you can pop another one in the 5.25" bay, or alternatively, switch to 2.5" drives depending on your capacity needs.Streetwind - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
There's actually a ton more drive bays in there than it looks like. If you wanted to go all out, you could mount, all at the same time:- Five 3.5" drives in the HDD cages
- One 2.5" drive in a mounting bracket below the bottom HDD cage
- Two 2.5" drives in mounting brackets between the bottom HDD cage and the power supply bay
- Two 2.5" drives in mounting brackets on the right side panel
- Four 2.5" drives in a (third party) 5.25-to-2.5 adapter in place of the optical drive
So yeah, while you can't do a RAID with six 3.5" drives, that's still a hell of a lot of storage for a mini-ITX case.
tjoynt - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
Just curious: why do you regret using the Lian Li PC-Q08? Or do you regret using WHS? ;)oDii - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
WHS V1 is fine for slow, slightly protected storage.My problem with the PC-Q08 is that once you start loading it up - lots of disks, standard ATX sized PSU (maybe slightly longer due to modular cables) - there just isn't enough room for everything. At the moment after the last time I took everything out of it, I put the HDD activity cable around the wrong way - and still haven't corrected because of how much of a pain opening it and accessing even small things in it is.
Perhaps to even slightly talk against my own argument of "needs more drive bays!"; the Q08 stacks the drives so close together that the cable between the SATA power connector leads becomes a major cable management problem - if it sticks out too much, you can't put the case back together. Similarly, you're pretty much forced to use 90 degrees rotated SATA data cables as standard cables would break the plastic supports of the drives they're attached to long before you managed to wrestle the side panel back on.
The positive thing about the Prodigy is that it seems like they've really got that general accessibility down with the rotated motherboard tray, as Dustin mentions on page 3.
I guess this case would be great for someone dabbling with ZFS - few disks, and a few locations for ZFS cache/ZIL.
sheltem - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link
Too bad the Lian Li Q25 was released afterwards. It's a bit taller, but not as wide, because it ditches the dvd drives and has 5 hot swap hard drive bays. The side panels comes off easier.