This is my first story so I figured I'd better make a good one. I'm a computer technology reviewer on youtube. I'm small time but I have had some decent success, especially in 2017 and as I do I was looking for review samples or sponsorship from component manufactures when I stumbled upon this:
www.xynos.com - turns out this company is about 3 hours south of me and I live in bum fk nowhere Ontario Canada so I had to get to the bottom of it. I scavenged the internet and I had a hard time finding any information or a youtube video of the case. It's so futuristic and interesting yet so excruciatingly ugly, I had to know more. As far as I could tell the website had been up for at least a few years, how could this diamond of the rough escape, and then I saw the price, 1900 USD DOLLARS WTF.
I tried calling the number on the site with no answer so I decided to leave an email. I was starting to think this was a failed endeavor that never left the ground floor? Weeks later the owner contacted me and was interested in sending me a case for review, I explained how it was hard to find any information on the case online, he was confused as he had such a good website. I explained people want to see youtube videos, they want to see computers built by users as a real life use case. He explained he had only been contacted by 1 YT reviewer before and he had sent him a case 6 months ago but the video had never been done. He also was extremely interested in making me a custom side panel. This led me to believe these cases were more 1 offs. Turns out the owner of Xynos owns a machine shop and decided to try to make these custom cases a few years back using his resources. We decided he would make me a custom AMD Ryzen branded case as this would help attract attention in the wake of the launch of Ryzen.
Weeks later and this was the final result:
Now any level of computer enthusiast could tell there are a lot of problems with the design and aesthetics of this case.
#1 - It's really ugly, one of my viewers recently commented that "it looks like a nuclear power plant, or a computer case with 2 woks on top of it"
#2 - It has really poor airflow management, 2 giant intakes, no outtake, the owner said to me "air should go through your PSU and Video Card, that will be enough"
#3 - No room for water cooling or large CPU cooler. I literally had to ask Noctua for their smallest tower CPU cooler to maintain proper overclock
#4 - It's really tiny inside, no room for cable management, only fits mATX boards and a large video card will cook in it.
#5 - It costs more than most complete systems! It's 1899.99 USD - Nobody would ever buy it!
Now you might think that the owner is simply inflating the costs because this is a one off project, you'd be wrong! He has actually manufactured and colored enough parts to make at least 20 cases. The worst part is he admitted that the case costs in upwards of $600 dollars alone in metal before the CNC machine even touches it! That doesn't account for the labour, CNC machine part ware, LCD screens, acrylic or hardware. In other words, this is a HUGE FAIL..
So in the end I'm torn, I want to support a fellow Canadian, fellow computer enthusiast, someone who had a dream to do something custom and different, however, it's just such a fail. I've been using the case for about 3 weeks now and I'm seriously considering moving on to a different case as there are just too many down sides to this one.
Anyways, Let me know what you think of it. It's a disaster and I'm pretty sure nobody will ever buy it, but in the end it will go down as the Delorean of computer cases. It's heavy, made of a weird metal, it's way too expensive to produce, way too expensive to buy and it's really ugly, but maybe it will find a place in a movie about time travel and become a cult icon!
-Timmy Joe
http://www.youtube.com/timmyjoereviewsanything
http://www.timmyjoe.com