Hiper Anubis

Hiper Anubis

Manafacturer: Hiper Group
UK Price (as reviewed): £129.25 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $219.99 (ex. Tax)

I’ll be blunt – when the Hiper Anubis first came skidding into the bit-tech HQ (or labs to use the currently fashionable office slang), fired from some super-efficient PR machine, it wasn’t immediately on the top of our list of things to write about.

The box, a black and purple thing which weighed a lot more than other boxes on and about my desk, was probably to blame for most of it. When you’ve got a choice between playing Crysis, Portal or a Hiper Anubis, it’s kind of obvious where you’re going to head first.

I mean, Crysis isn’t exactly spelled properly, but it sure looks better on a page than a Hiper Anubis. In fact, the Hiper Anubis lead me through the whole spectrum of human emotions before I even got the thing properly unpacked.

First, I looked at the box and felt indifferent. Then I lifted it and felt annoyed. Then I left it for a bit and felt disbelief that I would ever have enough time on my schedule to look at it. Then I opened the box, say the ridged roof of the case and felt repulsed. Then, Richard lifted it out of the box and we looked at it and felt happiness, brotherhood and awe. We shared a moment, looking at what was actually a surprisingly good-looking case.


Then I felt annoyed again and swore loudly, realising that I then had to get on with my work.

A Noob is... what?

I sat in front of the Anubis and looked it up and down. Then I looked it down and up. Then I circled round it, tried to pick it up, hurt my wrist and put it down again, wincing. The Anubis is, I concluded, an odd case. It has a heatsink-like set of ridges on the roof, latches on the side panels instead of thumbscrews and it has a really ugly name which makes me think it should be a pyramid shape instead.

In short, it’s not the type of case which should look good. It should look like some sort of mechanical monstrosity and I should have dismissed it immediately for being a dust gathering and hard-to-clean tin box.

The simple fact though is that the Anubis does look good and, even better, the closer you examine it the more you start to appreciate its clever little design features. The fact that the heatsink-like ridges on the top of the case will inevitably collect large amounts of dust is got around by the included long-bristled cleaning brush and the Egyptian name is loosely tied into the marketing theme for the product - i.e. the case comes with an individually numbered keyring with a picture on one side that, to my uneducated mind at least, looks similar to an Egyptian God.



There are a few problems with the outside of the case, but they are all relatively minor. The first problem is the door, which clanks shut noisily and doesn’t have any easy way to open it. It’s obvious a lot of thought has been put into the design of the case, so it’s a little disappointing that a section of the door couldn’t be cut away or knurled and suffice as a handle.

Still, for the typical bit-tech reader cutting away a bit of metal and adding a bit of foam pad to deaden the sound of the closing door isn’t exactly a big deal. You know what a dremel is, right?

Much more of an issue is the odd choice of connections on the case. The power and reset buttons are located up top and not under the door, which is a help. It also has to be said that the power button passed ‘The Martin Test’ with flying colours and was a pleasure to press over and over, like a modder with OCD.

The connections on offer are two USBs, a headphone jack, a microphone port and a line-out. There's unfortunately no firewire and no e-SATA, which will be a bit of a pain for some.