Support
Motherboard support:You can easily get access to the
main case just by taking the sides off, and if you want you can just simply undo the other screws and remove the motherboard tray, for easy installation, it took a matter of minutes to remove the cage and put in the motherboard, also Coolermaster included lots of motherboard mounts.
This case looks perfect they seem to have thought of everything, even including cooling features in design for example the front grill which feeds in air and allows it to look nice as well, also keeping the case silent, the only problem I have is with the fan on the top of the case which only has a grill present and I guess they could have done something here like made it match the front. There are 2 LEDS and the normal power and also a reset switch... this case looks nice. Yum ;)
Pro Designed cooling:
When I got my first full tower which was an AOpen HX08, which I thought was amazing due to the case fan mount points, now companies such as Coolermaster are thinking about these things before they build the cases. There is no point I saying the case kept my athlon stable for 1 month, as every system is different what we can say is what helps. Coolermaster are aimed and designing, which means a lot of thinking about cooling systems that aren't only intended for Overclockers who will likely upgrade CPUs in 6 months. They want to think about cooling and reliability.
Cooling requires a lot of effort on several issues.
Obviously, the immediate environment is to aim and keep your system at proper operating spec. If your home hot, and humid, or very changes in temps a lot, there are
clear problems, you need to look in to, but you also need to cooler CPUS, Chipsets, Graphics cards, and now memory and cache chips. After which there are the cases and thee cooling, at the end of the day tear is no use it putting 50 case fans in your case because it will be loud and in effective you need to think what your doing before you even start. Without good case cooling, most other cooling systems are ineffective and can cause problems this is why Coolermaster is released a perfect case designed for cooling rather than to look good, which is does anyway!The Active Thermal Convection System
This is the new idea which Coolermaster have worked on without having to use huge pipes and water cooling kit, one should aim for a case temperature of around 30 Degrees (F) or (12 degrees Celsius) above room temperature but if it is higher you can sort this just by simply a case fan.
I built the system and then did the some major testing on it; I wasn't going to let this case get away with it easily...;)
The way that Coolermaster have done it is by simply making a large heat sink for a case and then putting in some case fans, which sounds simple but it isn't. There is a lot more to it than that, and clearly a lot of work has gone in to this case. For example the chrome grills over the fans and then the metal cover over the top. They haven't used cheap and nasty case fans but nice YS Tech ones, which are powerful and silent. They have also put one at the top of the case which makes sure the hot air is out ASAP, which is good for SCSI people who
have kit which hot, CDRW and DVD drives...Cooling Performance
As we are in the UK it is normally cold and wet, it was 12 degrees on the day of testing outside and 17 inside, I used the system playing Q2 lots as I was bored then checked emails and went on the Net for 2 hours or some and then did some benchmarks on the Ka7 to see if the clocked up speeds where any better, then finally I decided to do a Scan disk and a defrag on my 2 Scsi LVD drives.
How hot did the case get, with my AOpen hx08 it was HOT inside the case, and around the 35 -> 40 degrees c height after playing some Q2, but with the Coolermaster case I was so surprised in fact I was gob smacked! After doing all these tests, ambient case temperature never fluctuated outside of 67-73 F. This means you can rely on this case not to cause your kit to over heat! Which is excellent! If I ran with no fans the case was at 89 degrees F which is still cool, but it shows how much idealism has gone in to doing this case and how much technological system tuning they have used.
