Coolermaster Cosmos case

Here's a review of a case that I'm thinking of using for my next system. It's by s. Gunnell from Watauga,TX and was posted on Amazon.com.

"I basically divide cases into 3 types:

1. Economical cases which serve only to hold your hardware.

2. Gamer type cases can be cheap or one of the finest on the market, but they all offer features that make them flashy, such as windows, lights, etc.

3. Luxury cases I define as cases that are solid, very well built and made of top end materials, but are more artistic and stylish than gamer cases and are appropriate for your home office up to your corporate office.

This is one of the finest "Luxury" cases I have ever built a system in, and I have built well over 50. An aluminum skin all around with noise blocking material installed from the factory is just the start of a long list of quality features.

I would have liked to have 1 or 2 more 5 1/2 bays, but that is more of a personal preference. Above that, this is a solid, stunning case (much more so in person) that will leave most buyers content with their decision to buy this one.

UPDATE: After building several systems in this case for customers, a serious flaw became very apparent. The HDD (Hard Drive) bays basically act just like mini toaster ovens on the drives due to the enclosed design and lack of any ventilation or cooling. After doing a dual OS system install on one computer, the two installed (Raptor 150's) were so blazing hot you couldn't hold them in your hand for over a second.

REMEDY: Normally I would discontinue using a case with a flaw like this, but I like this case so much I decided to search for a solution instead, and found a great one if you WATER COOL your PC.

Get one Koolance Hard Drive Hydra-Pak soft Cooler #HD-50-L06 (HD)for each drive. The cooler fits between the drive and the removeable hard drive tray and fit right back into the slot. You CAN NOT use the Koolance dual drive cooler due to the way the hard drive bays are designed on this model. This solution allows you to "sandwich" the water cooling Hydra-Pak between the HDD and tray and have the water connections easily available on the back-side.

I water cool all my systems, and this solution turned a serious over-heating and HDD killer into a constant 20-24 temp. reading on the hard drives at all times (readings from a Koolance Exos 2 LX at both idle and heavy, sustained system testing)! If your not up to speed on temps., that's a pretty impressive range for a hard drive under heavy use. Went from a problem to a positive if you have decided to use water cooling on your new rig.

If your not water cooling, don't mess around too long before finding a good air solution or you will be replacing your hard drives and having the huge headache of re-installing everything back on new ones. The extreme high temps will be a huge burden on your HDD's over time if it doesn't knock them out sooner than later and cause a source of high temperature inside your case that makes all the fan cooling just that much more inefficient. The High Performance Raptor 10,000 drives I was using produce more heat than normal 7,200 drives so the problem may not be as extreme using most hard drives, but it will still be an issue that needs to be addressed sooner or later.