My Anidees AI Crystal XL Pro case review

[NadeMagnet69]

There is all of 1 youtube vid out there reviewing this case and I couldn't find any text reviews. So I thought I'd add mine.

 

This is a full tower from Anidees. And when I say full I mean you'll have to do a bit of searching to find any bigger. This is a heavy beast weighing in at 44 pounds before even building. But that also means it can fit just about every motherboard type invented, will have room for loads of custom water cooling setups, and will just about be future proof. Outside of really custom setups, or multiple PC in a single case, if you can think of it, it should fit in this case.

It comes with 5 Anidees AI-Tesseract Duo fans. 4 front, 1 rear, preinstalled. The fan hub to control them, and 2 addressable 15 LED strips. 2 different front panels, 1 tempered glass and 1 mesh. It's well built with lots of customizable options. This is all info you can find on their site so lets move on to the unboxing.

It was well packaged. The outside of the box suffered some damage in shipping but nothing serious happened to the case. That being said the front glass panel was placed on the outside top of the foam. Tempered glass is fairly strong, but I still would have like to see foam between it and the outside of the box.

What comes with the case. Not shown is the 2 LED strips.

The LED strips have standard JST-SM connectors like Phantek uses. This is one plugged into a Phantek fan frame.

However to use them with the Anidees fan hub you need to use the supplied cables than run from JST-SM to a smaller 3 pin connector.

The top, bottom, both side panels, and the front panel, all have dust filters. The top and side filters stick on with magnetic strips. Shown is the front panel filter.

The mesh front panel is decent looking.

But since it still has plenty of airflow options I'm going with the glass front.

Unlike my Corsair 750D which had individual front panel wires. These come in a nice ribbon cable.

The front panel has standard headphone and mic. 4 USB 3.0 headers. LED lit power and reset button. The 2 internal USB 3.0 connectors also has USB 2.0 connectors pigtailed off them for those motherboards without enough USB 3.0 headers which I thought was a nice touch.

The PSU shroud has decent enough airflow under the bottom radiator bracket.

But since I wanted to run a cable grommet through it. lol Like spice, the air must flow. So I went to town with a drill after cutting out the hole for the grommet.

Time to build

Time to cable manage. Good lord where to begin.

Finished more or less. The panel closes easily anyways. I may or may not have cried a bit during the process...

lol In my opinion managing cables is the hardest part of a PC build when you're not making a simple system and want to run things with Corsair's ICUE and lots of RGB.

The Anidees fans are decent looking. 9 different modes. Each different mode running through all the major colors for a total I didn't bother to count. Suffice to say it's a lot.

However a deal breaker for me is that the Anidees fan hub PMW won't work with my motherboard for some reason.  So with the rear fan I was always planning on replacing. I yanked the front 4 too for Noctua Redux 1700. With fan frames also so it'll look better being the same as the others anyways. The unlit LED strips are still waiting for Corsair adapter cables.

 

Pros:

Huge, with room for numerous builds if that's what you want.

Tempered glass. Not acrylic that scratches if you look at it wrong like my Corsair 750D.

Well built modular design. Most internals are held with screws, not rivets, letting you easily remove things like PSU shroud, side fan cages, and HD cages.

Large amount of radiator and fan options.

 

Cons:

First and foremost price. This is definitely one of the more expensive cases.

Huge, if that's NOT what you want.

Fan hub comes with PWM but it may not work with your motherboard.

Fans have a non western standard 5pin connector.

Weight.

Would have liked to see at least half an inch more room for cable management. I could have routed tons of it down the back side panel fan spots but I wanted to keep it open for airflow.

The 4 cable grommets are extremely shallow on the part that goes around the hole so they don't stay in place well. I thought they had left one out when unboxing but it just came loose in shipping. Was a huge unneeded hassle to fit them back in place after running cables through them.

 

My build:

I7 10700K

Asrock Z490 Taichi

2x16GB Crucial Ballistix 3600

2TB Adata M.2

1TB Samsung 970 Evo

Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card

GTX 660 GPU..... Sigh....... Was suppose to be a 3080 by now.

Corsair RM850X PSU

6 Noctua 140mm Chromax fans

8 Noctua 120mm Redux 1700 fans

2 Noctua 120mm Redux 1200 fans

Arctic Liquid Freezer 2 240

RGB:

All controlled with Corsair ICUE

3 Lighting node pros

1 Commander pro

5V 3pin Aura type powered splitter box

RGB Acrylic GPU brace

Thermaltake Pacific R1 RAM cover

4 Phantek neon LED strips

6 Airgoo neon LED strips

1 Infinity mirror

9 Phantek fan frames

Cables:

Cablemod pro cables extensions

Akasa USB 3.0 extension cables

3 4 way fan splitters

2 Noctua 2 way fan splitters

4 Noctua 4 pin fan extension cables

And 1 partridge in a pear tree...

 

So that's my review. Hope this helps anyone interested in Anidees. I'm happy with this case. I don't see myself ever having to buy another case.

 

[WhitetailAni]

A fellow 600-series EVGA graphics card owner!

Yours is better than my 650 Ti Boost, though "better" isn't saying much.

I can't wait for the 3060...

[NadeMagnet69]

17 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

A fellow 600-series EVGA graphics card owner!

Yours is better than my 650 Ti Boost, though "better" isn't saying much.

I can't wait for the 3060...

When I first built at the end of July, I originally went with a 2060. Wasn't happy with its performance so I returned it for a 2080 Super FE. Then saw the 3000 series was coming out. Luckily I managed to return it with 2 days left out of the 30 days they give to return. I was like sweet!!! I'm going to get a much better GPU, AND save money since the 2080 price had ballooned to up almost 1k. Then came launch day.... Sigh..... So now I'm stuck back with the 660 until who knows when. Hopefully I can get a 3080 by Christmas.

 

If you're wondering why I bought this case so soon after building a new PC, it's because my Corsair 750D airflow edition got scratched to hell in that short amount of time. That's ridiculous and look completely awful with all that RGB shining through. I have no idea how it got so bad. It's not like I was rough with it, quite the opposite. I only ever touched it with those fine cloths for cleaning eye glasses. I don't even wear glasses. I bought those specifically for my TV and LED screens. Those are softer than microfiber. Like I said I don't see myself ever buying another case. But if I do, I sure as hell am never getting another one with acrylic.

[thrasher_565]

On 11/1/2020 at 1:29 PM, NadeMagnet69 said:

When I first built at the end of July, I originally went with a 2060. Wasn't happy with its performance so I returned it for a 2080 Super FE. Then saw the 3000 series was coming out. Luckily I managed to return it with 2 days left out of the 30 days they give to return. I was like sweet!!! I'm going to get a much better GPU, AND save money since the 2080 price had ballooned to up almost 1k. Then came launch day.... Sigh..... So now I'm stuck back with the 660 until who knows when. Hopefully I can get a 3080 by Christmas.

 

If you're wondering why I bought this case so soon after building a new PC, it's because my Corsair 750D airflow edition got scratched to hell in that short amount of time. That's ridiculous and look completely awful with all that RGB shining through. I have no idea how it got so bad. It's not like I was rough with it, quite the opposite. I only ever touched it with those fine cloths for cleaning eye glasses. I don't even wear glasses. I bought those specifically for my TV and LED screens. Those are softer than microfiber. Like I said I don't see myself ever buying another case. But if I do, I sure as hell am never getting another one with acrylic.

ya nice build. ya there expensive cases if you can even find them. that looks like alot of cable but compared to my case im not looking forward to it... i think i need an labeler good thing is i have palace to hide all the cables so wee will see if i "cable mange it"

[NadeMagnet69]

I just wrote on some masking tape and stuck them on as temporary markers. The only thing I really had to make sure was separated was the 9 fan frames into 5 and 4 daisy chained so I didn't fry a lighting node pro or the commander.  9 frames at .72 max amps each would be 6.48amps. Well beyond the max 4.5amps the LNP or commander can handle. If set to white anyways. Once those were separated the rest didn't matter which LNP or Commander they got plugged into and I just figured out which was which while programing them in ICUE. 

[TVwazhere]

-Moved to Members Review-

[NadeMagnet69]

Oops, my bad. I've honestly never scrolled down far enough to see this sub forum.

[DomRosa]

How is the airflow? I’m making a pc and I have the case. I’m going to use cooler master prismatic fans.

[NadeMagnet69]

Great. It's hard to have bad airflow with that many fan placement options.

I've changed my setup since I wrote this. I'm still using the glass front instead of the mesh but I've changed the front 3 to Corsair LL and the bottom 120 is now a sensor panel. The 4 glass side 120 are LL. 2 Bottom PSU shroud are QL. Bottom middle 120 still Noctua. All intakes.

Top 3 still Noctua 140. Rear 120 LL. AIO on back panel side now in push pull with 2 Noctua and a 120 Noctua under it. All exhaust.

I switched out the fans because several of my Phantek fan frame blue LED burned out already. Phantek took care of me on the first one but I didn't want to have to keep going through support. Plus I like ICUE Corsair's fans. I also cut the glass side fan cage off and replaced the stock dust filter with magnetic demciflex dust filters. Looks a lot better like that and those filters are like fabric. And since I had extra fans after switching and still free fan headers I mounted a 120 and 140 off the EATX motherboard holes in the mid as boosters. And then because my last fan header looked lonely and just to see if I could I added 2 60 mm to the back, one over the empty PCIe slot and next to it. lol So I'm kinda cheating when it comes to airflow. But even when I was running it in stock config airflow wasn't an issue.

[DomRosa]

Are you using argb or rgb? I have twenty fans and want to figure out argb set up but doesn’t look promising