Akasa's Cypher X133 is a Premium Custom Chassis for Intel's NUC 13 Extreme

[TheLostSwede]

Akasa might be the most well known third party housing manufacturer for Intel's NUC series of devices, most of which offer passive cooling and full aluminium construction. At Computex, Akasa was showing off its Cypher X133 which the company has been selling to system integrators for some time already, but there hasn't been a public announcement. The reason for keeping this product on the low is because it's using a low profile, server grade liquid cooling solution which takes some skill to install in the compact chassis. That said, the entire internals slide out on rails, which should make most parts much easier to access than in a typical chassis this size.

Even though it's a compact chassis, it can house an NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics card, in addition to the NUC 13 Extreme, which is no small feat. That said, the width limit sits at 3.9 slots for the GPU, so some custom models with wider coolers might not work. The chassis is very much a premium product with a very nice finish that is easily comparable to high-end notebooks. Hopefully Akasa will figure out a way to make a more DIY friendly version of this chassis, although it's possible that the price tag will be too high for this to make sense as a DIY build.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Daven]

It just looks like a box with a massive cable mess inside. How is this premium?

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Out of curiosity, is that CPU block something they cooked up themselves just for this build? Or is that an "off-the-shelf" product?

It just looks like a box with a massive cable mess inside. How is this premium?

They're selling a case, how does the cable management of whomever did the system inside of the case matter? Or are you implying there's a lack of cable management "mechanisms" in the chassis?

 

[Daven]

They're selling a case, how does the cable management of whomever did the system inside of the case matter?

You very well know that case manufacturers build numerous cable management strategies into their cases in order to maximize air flow through the cases and make it easy to add/remove components.

This case has none of those strategies implemented.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Oh wow, they made a micro ATX case, with proprietary BS in it! Amazeballs!

 

[TheLostSwede]

Out of curiosity, is that CPU block something they cooked up themselves just for this build? Or is that an "off-the-shelf" product?

View attachment 298307

Not sure who makes it, but I was told it was normally used in 1U servers. They could've made the case wider for more clearance I guess.

It just looks like a box with a massive cable mess inside. How is this premium?

The material for one. It's made of really thick aluminium that's finished really well. Something can be premium without everyone agreeing it's a good product. I think premium brand handbags are useless, not everyone agrees with me on that.

 

[Daven]

Not sure who makes it, but I was told it was normally used in 1U servers. They could've made the case wider for more clearance I guess.


The material for one. It's made of really thick aluminium that's finished really well. Something can be premium without everyone agreeing it's a good product. I think premium brand handbags are useless, not everyone agrees with me on that.

In this case I have more of an issue with the presentation or lack thereof. A serious case provider should show the best way to build its innards and provide accessories or hard routing hardware inside the case to manage cables. While the outside might look nice, as soon as you open it, a potential customer would only see a mess that only an amateur would put together and be immediately turned off.

I’m not sure why I’m so put off by this but I love SFF case builds and the arrangement of the inside of the case shocked me.

 

[TheLostSwede]

In this case I have more of an issue with the presentation or lack thereof. A serious case provider should show the best way to build its innards and provide accessories or hard routing hardware inside the case to manage cables. While the outside might look nice, as soon as you open it, a potential customer would only see a mess that only an amateur would put together and be immediately turned off.

That is an entirely different matter and offers some validity, but it's something I have zero control over.

I’m not sure why I’m so put off by this but I love SFF case builds and the arrangement of the inside of the case shocked me.

I think the Intel NUC Extreme means there are quite a few limiations as well, but I honestly don't know.
The build quality of the chassi is at least top notch compared to many similar products out there, with very nice coating on the aluminium as well.