Bitfenix Prodigy Mini-ITX PC Chassis Review

With the side panel off we can see there are all kinds of interesting things going on inside this chassis, although not all of them are immediately apparent. Starting at the left hand side we can see the pre-installed 120mm fan which comes with a 3pin motherboard connection, below that we have the horizontal mounting plate for the motherboard, which also covers the top of the power supply area, on this you can see there are 4 oval cut outs for cable routing from the PSU. On the right hand side running from top to bottom we have the 5.25″ drive bay bracket, a 3 x 3.5″ quick release hard drive bay and a further 2 x 3.5″ hard drive bay. Lastly on the right hand side we can see there is a further pre-installed 120mm fan which also comes with a 3 pin connection.

It starts to get more interesting when you realise that each of those 3 drive bays are removable, the 3 x 3.5″ drive bay slides out with two push clips, as you can see in the picture below, which also features 3 slide out trays for easy installation of your drives, removal of this bay allows you to install a much longer graphics card, amongst other things.

Here you can see we have removed that drive bay, giving us a better view of the inside of the front of the chassis, which has mounting points for a further 120mm fan above the pre-installed one, or you can remove that completely and install a larger fan of upto 200mm.

The bottom drive bay that holds 2 x 3.5″ drives can also be removed, leaving even more room for cooling and other devices inside the chassis, this is done by removing the 6 screws in the base on the chassis. If you look closely you can see there are 4 smaller screw holes in the base, allowing you to mount an SSD hard drive inside the chassis, although there are further mounting points for SSD hidden throughout this case, you can also see there is a removable air filter that gives breathing room to your power supply.

Continuing the trend of less is more, the optical drive bay is also easily removed via some screws in the side and behind the front panel, this allows for a much bigger cooling setup in the top of the chassis, something which we will be undertaking in our complete build section.

Things don’t look much different with the backplate removed either, but it is worth pointing out that between the PSU area and the bottom drive tray (once removed) there is room for a further two SSD hard drives, should you not need room for any 3.5″ drives of course.

Each of the side panels are really heavy duty, made of rather thick steel, adding some serious stability and weight to the chassis, but also helping to sound proof it as a whole. Behind the rear panel we can see there is the circuit board for the power button, reset switch etc, with all the required cables, such as the USB 3.0 header, which is hard-wired with a USB 2.0 adaptor for those that don’t have native USB 3.0 support on their motherboard, you will also find the usual HD audio, AC97 connection amongst these cables. The best thing about this side panel though is that plastic grid you can see which allows you to install a further two SSD hard drives on the panel.