Cooler Master Cosmos S is a chassis I would believe to be heavily geared towards expert gamers and enthusiast gamers alike. As you will see in this review, there is a lot of potential for this case. From outside the case, it has a semi-carbon fiber look. Mesh style pattern on top, left panel and front bays. The chassis is made out of aluminum, but I would say the case feels more like steel. The handles at the top and bottom of the case are extremely useful, especially when moving the case. The case weighed in at 38lbs when it was shipped. When I got everything installed, the case easily weighed around 55lbs. So these handles at the top made it very easy to lift the case into small spaces.
As you can see, the Cooler Master Cosmos S has a nice overall look to it. But that cannot be all for this review, as they say. You cannot judge a book by its cover.
The inside of the case is the next aspect that I wish to cover in this review. The first thing I have to point out is how much room there is inside when nothing is installed. The first time I opened the case was quiet easy. To open the case I simply pushed a lever up which is located on the back of the case. But anyway, when I started installing hardware into the case, I noticed the general inside features in the case such as the 250mm fan and the three fans that came with it. Two of the fans are plain black fans. The other fan sits in the front-bottom, which you can see from looking at the drive bay area. That fan is clear, when turned on its glows neon red. This is rare because it is hard to find a good red neon fan.
They say the 250mm fan pushes 150CFM, but it only feels like it’s pushing 60 CFM. The 250mm fan spins at around 940 RPMs. It's not bad, but the other three fans in the case spin at 1200 RPMs from my readings. 1200 RPMs for a 120mm is not adequate for me so I installed my three blue LED fans. Each of those fans runs at 2400 RPMs generating 80 CFM. Since I installed three of my blue LED fans on the top, I moved the plain black fan that was located on the top to the bottom 120mm fan slot at the bottom of the case.
Next up is I want to show you the inside which I am sort of getting off-topic about.
Motherboard Tray Area.
Top and rear fans area. Note the water cooling inputs. You won't have to drill new holes if you have an external water cooling system.
Far Bottom Fan Area.
Now we can move along. From looking at my previous pictures, one can see the cable management. It took me about three hours to put my system together the way I wanted it, while taking adequate pictures and notes. Even after I finished cabling for three hours, I was not satisfied personally with the job I did. Here is how it turned out before.
No adequate wiring, So I re-tried
I cleaned it up a little bit, the 24pin connector is no longer hanging down.
For such a roomy case, I feel that there can be better cable management techniques executed. I think about a ¼ inch in the right hand side of the case (behind the motherboard tray) would be a lot better. This increase in room would allow for more wires to be tucked away. Also, I had to tweak my Thermalright 120 Extreme to allow the side panel to pop back on easily. So it ended like this.
If you look at the picture above once, you can see the fan blowing warm air from the CPU back into the case, onto the video card. This might be considered a flaw in the case manufacturing. Air has to be pushed into the case by any means. Let me tell you the hardware listing so you know what we are testing it on.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Motherboard: ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi ***
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracers PC2-6400 2GB (Rev1) / PC2-8500 2GB (Rev2)
Video Card: Nvidia BFG Geforce 8800GTX OC2 (626mhz Core Clock / 1000mhz Memory Clock)
Sound Card: Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Professional Fatal1ty Series
Power Supply: Antec TruePower Quattro 1000W
Hard Drives: Western Digital 16MB Cache 250GB SATAII , Western digital 200GB IDE
Reader/Writer: Lite-On LightScribe DVD Burner
Keyboard: Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
Monitor: Philips Amblight 42” 1080p HDTV
***The ASUS Maximus Formula SE could not be used in this review due to Poor Customer Service.
Now that we have covered the hardware, let’s see how the tests do.
Fan #1 and Fan #3 are two of the fans in the system, Fan #1 is the rear fan in the case. Fan #3 is the 250mm Fan on the side of the case. The only problem with this is the 120mm is only 1100 rpms here and the 250mm is running at 960 RPMs. As you can also see, my CPU is Idling at 30C when overclocked to 3.6 GHz on 1.5 volts. That is not bad at all. My Previous case was idling at 38C, so an 8C drop when switching to this case. That is not bad for air cooling.
At the beginning of the stress test, it is staying cool. 70-75C during max load.
Near the end of the stress test, Temps are pretty solid.
Test is in cool down state, and the CPU instantly cooled down to 33-35C. That is pretty good. The cool down rate is excellent. Remember, this is a 64-bit OCCT test in Windows Vista. I am pretty sure it will run a lot cooler in Windows XP under 32-bit. So If it's doing this well with a Quad-Core on Air. It's using 100% of the CPU and maxing out at 70-75C at 1.5125v. Most Games currently that are Multi-threaded only use about 30%-40% of my Quad-Core. So this is excellent case so far for gaming.
There is one more thing I need to bring up, the top panel on the top of the case. With The Touch Sensitive Power button and the Top Panel door. This thing is packing four USB up front, one eSATA, one Fireware and the headphone and microphone jack. The power button got some getting use to, since I am use to a restart button and a power button that goes *click*. So playing with this Touch Sensitive button was very interesting to say the least. But I still feel the need that there should be a small restart button of some sort. Anyway, that ends the detail part of my review. Now for Grading and scores.
•Design – 9 out of 10 - Well the design is very good, There is still room for Improvement.
•Wire Management – 7 out of 10 – Like I said in the Review, I think there should be at least ¼ of an inch more behind the motherboard tray.
•Cooling – 8 out of 10 – Having a 250mm fan is good, But the Stock 120mm fans only run at 1200 RPMs but they do have a low dB level.
•Performance – 9 out of 10 – As I stated near the end of the review, it cools very fast and keeps general temps low while under max load, even while overclocked. So you can get maximum gaming performance. no matter what type of cooling you are using.
•Easy Usage – 7 out of 10 – The wires like I said took me awhile and 2 tries to get even near where I wanted them, the 5 ¼ bays are very easy to remove the covers, but the locking system is totally useless. I tried everything. But I lock them and I can still easily remove the DVD-Burner of mine without trying. Other than that, it’s pretty good. Easy water-cooling design. Easy air cooling design.
Anyway, that ends my review for now. I made sure I covered everything. I would highly recommend this case for gamers. It has a very sleek design, a very good cooling system and excellent performance. Two weeks from now, I am going to do a follow-up on the case, and see how it does during the test of time.
Overall Rating – 8 frags out of 10
Which earns Clan Team Xtreme Approved.
- By [cTx]Warboy
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Originally Posted by DoomSayer
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