Building With The Shinobi
All of the Shinobi’s drive bays use screw-free clips, and even its USB 3.0-to-USB 2.0 adapter is hard-wired to the same cord, leaving only a few screws and standoffs in its installation kit. BitFenix also adds a few cable ties for your convenience.
The Shinobi is not designed for 2.5” drives, but its 5.25”-to-3.5” external bay adapter has extra holes for one. Ours fits as shown.
Flip latches secure both the adapter tray and optical drive, while screws support the motherboard, power supply, and video card. The Shinobi even has enough room for the mildly-oversized 10.5”-wide enthusiast-oriented motherboards that were once popular.
Not as easy to see in the image above is that the Shinobi’s front-panel audio cable is stretched to its limit across the motherboard we're testing with, and that platform's FP Audio header is an inch closer to that cable's limit than a lot of the other boards we have in our lab. That means the Shinobi’s audio cable is about an inch too short to be run through the lower cable hole with most builds. Moving the cable to a higher access hole exposes more of it. If you're hardcore about aesthetics, that might bother you.
The Shinobi’s tinted side window softens the harsh indicator lights found on many of today’s enthusiast-class motherboards, and we like that it lacks the garish lighting often found on competing products.
