Hardware Cooler Master Cosmos

that thing looks so painfully gaudy, words cannot begin to approach an approximation of the loathing i feel when i lay eyes upon it.

in other words, there's no accounting for taste

 

The Cosmos is an interesting case with good possibilities for building a quite system. However, having the USB audio ports on top makes it difficult for those of us who have to keep it under the desk. A big NO for me

 

remember that this case weights 17kg

 

would be nice to get some sound proofed panels for my stacker..... mmmmm I could do this myself, any idea where I can get sound proofing foam that they use in these things?

 

check places that sell car speakers particulary sub boxes i have found adhesive backed foam from those places though it may be a bit of an overkill for a case

 

Bindi and I have been meaning to get around to a soundproofing podcast/article for a while. I'll give him a poke about it tomorrow as we have some of the foam lying around.

 

Quite an awesome looking case, I could see the carry handles coming in handy since I lug mine backwards and forwards to uni quite a lot. How study are the handles?

One thing I would be worried about though is how toasty my raptor would get in one of those trays, and from the seems of it, they wouldn't get any direct ventilation.

 

No direct ventilation unless you put them near the base fan targetted it at the vent holes in the tray walls.

Carry handles are very sturdy - Tim uses this case a weight at the moment, lifting it at every chance.

 

I can just imagine how dusty those things would get though, from the placement of the panel, it's obviously designed to go under the desk, but I can imagine the fan vents in the bottom pulling up a lot of dust.

 

I really like the look of this case

 

Exactly. Now imagine the guy that fills it up w/ 3x150GB raps and 3x1TB Hitachi's?! Did you guys throw down HDD temps by chance yet?

 

2 questions:-

1: Might it be feasible to replace the lower rails with castors for those of us who wish to retain use of our spine?
2: Does the eSATA port on the case require some funky mobo header, or does it just plug into a standard SATA port?

 

As an owner of this case for about 6 weeks now, I wanted to throw in my little review as I have some serious conflict of opinions concerning parts of this case than some reviews...

First, here's my set-up for those who want to know.
- Coolermaster Cosmos (duh)
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- Windows XP Pro & Vista Ultimate (64 bit) on dual boot
- EVGA nForce 680i SLI MOBO
- Two EVGA 8800 GTS 640 GPU's in SLI
- 4 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer Memory (x1 gb each)
- Ultra X3 1000-Watt Energy Efficient Modular Power Supply
- TWO WD Raptor 150 GB HDD's in RAID 0
- TWO Samsung 500 GB HDD's floating in backup
- Swiftech 655 water pump
- Swiftech Apogee GTX CPU Block
- TWO Danger Den 8800 GTS GPU Water Blocks
- Danger Den Black Ice 360 Radiator
- Danger Den Bay Resevior
- Creative Sound Blaster XFI Xtreme Gamer Fatality pro Sound
- etc., etc

First of all, these pictures in magazines and on the internet in now way come close to how beautiful this case truly is, inside and out. I bought two, one for myself and one to airbrush for my side business. I felt guilty painting it! In real life, it is the best looking case I have seen by far, and in my side business I see almost all of them first person. I am sure, however, that some people may have different opinions, that's why companies make more than one style of case for the masses....

I had a few little gripes here and there during inspection and installation, but the absolute killer on this case is the HARD DRIVE BAYS AND SET-UP! These little slide out trays are pitiful! I wouldn't expect to see such a flimsy peice of trash in a $25 case, they are so flimsy they amplify the HDD noise by 5X from the aluminum vibrating. They really do look like little toaster oven trays, and they literally lived up to their looks.

The design, positioning and enclosed compartment cooked my hard drives. I had them out before they were ruined, but have one of those toaster oven wrist burns from doing it. I was really shocked at how hot they got in just over an hour while I performed the main install, and I was only loading onto 1 drive the whole time. I saw an optional attempt by Cooler Master to put a fan on top of the HDD bays (by sacrificing one of the few front bays), but IMO it will take much more to fix the "HDD Hades Box" problem.

I am really dissapointed about it because it is much too large of an issue for me to overlook, I will have to rig some sort of optional mount or cooling source to see if it drops the temps. No tall tales here, when I took out the first Samsung HDD and Raptor HDD they were so hot I actually had to get an oven mit to get the other two out.

Just to make sure it wasn't a HDD problem, I installed them into my other server case and ran them for 16 hours straight while working on a customers web site (after they cooled off of course). As always, they came out warm afterwards with no problems. I just wanted to give a heads up. I've seen a couple of other buyers who complained or scrapped their HDD's but don't know if it is widespread common-knowledge by now. If anyone has seen a good fix for this, please let me know.

But other than the HDD's, this case sticks it's nose right up there with Lian Li no question, and imo pulls ahead of most of their cases.

Thanks!!

 

That's my main bitch about this case too. Well, that and those grommets aren't as quiet as a decent suspension system. Still, it's a solid effort and I hope to see something like this w/ a window, better hdd placement, perhaps a side fan, and removable grills here soon.

 

So I bought my friends system from him last weekend, about the same as they guy above spec wise with the silver beast for the case.

It is heavy, the outside is solid and the handles are nice but with this weight you need two hands. I don't like the HD trays just because they look like they cook, I have too much crap in front of it to open it up and feel but with one HD I don't think its too hot. I am looking to mod that out if possible or at least put a fan above it.

The best thing about this case is the sound, it is quiet, leave it on while I sleep quiet. That makes it worth it for me at least.