Soldato
Got the Coolermaster Cosmos on Wednesday. As expected it was a bit of a beast - especially in its packaging. Carrying it up 2 flights of stairs was 'fun'.
It has 4 large handles; 2 top, 2 bottom, which make transporting the case a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. As an added bonus they don't dig into my carpet as regular case feet would and enable the case to be maneuvered quite easily.
There's tons of space to work with inside and a very good clearing around the motherboard meaning I can pretty much use whatever air cooler I want.
I'm going to use this case as an all-in-one work/gaming/storage machine. For the gaming side of things I'm not going to be going SLI so just about any case would be fine. However I do want to install 8 hard drives but this case only has space for 6. I knew this before I purchased but I thought I'd just use up 2 of the optical drive bays for hard drives instead...
.... and this is where the problems start.
The cosmos has this 'unique' push-button locking mechanism which works GREAT for optical drives. There are however some incredibly bad design flaws which go with this. First of all, you cannot screw anything in easily as the push-button locking mechanisms are a 'tad awkward' to remove and on the opposite end there's no access to the screw holes as a big metal plate covers it all.
In addition to this the vent for the hard drive area is positioned above, leading straight into the bottom 5.25" drive bay, which basically means you can't put anything there unless you want your hard drives to suffocate. So where did the genius's at Coolermaster decide to position the only 5.25" > 3.5" adapter? Yep, right there. It needs to be screwed in, and that's the only slot that provides access to the mounting holes on both sides of the case.
Don't get me wrong though - I love this case. Its just a shame its looking like I'm going to have to spend a fair bit on purchasing up to 3 full-size 5.25" > 3.5" bay converters and some extra cooling.
Speaking of cooling, I bought the Scythe KAMA-BAY Black System Cooler which looks great with this case but of course there's no way to install the bugger.
For those of you who like to install ANYTHING other than an optical drive into your 5.25" drive bays; this isn't the case for you. Even if you manage to install what you want to - the door is very unlikely to shut if there are any protruding bits such as fan controller knobs.
It has 4 large handles; 2 top, 2 bottom, which make transporting the case a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. As an added bonus they don't dig into my carpet as regular case feet would and enable the case to be maneuvered quite easily.
There's tons of space to work with inside and a very good clearing around the motherboard meaning I can pretty much use whatever air cooler I want.
I'm going to use this case as an all-in-one work/gaming/storage machine. For the gaming side of things I'm not going to be going SLI so just about any case would be fine. However I do want to install 8 hard drives but this case only has space for 6. I knew this before I purchased but I thought I'd just use up 2 of the optical drive bays for hard drives instead...
.... and this is where the problems start.
The cosmos has this 'unique' push-button locking mechanism which works GREAT for optical drives. There are however some incredibly bad design flaws which go with this. First of all, you cannot screw anything in easily as the push-button locking mechanisms are a 'tad awkward' to remove and on the opposite end there's no access to the screw holes as a big metal plate covers it all.
In addition to this the vent for the hard drive area is positioned above, leading straight into the bottom 5.25" drive bay, which basically means you can't put anything there unless you want your hard drives to suffocate. So where did the genius's at Coolermaster decide to position the only 5.25" > 3.5" adapter? Yep, right there. It needs to be screwed in, and that's the only slot that provides access to the mounting holes on both sides of the case.
Don't get me wrong though - I love this case. Its just a shame its looking like I'm going to have to spend a fair bit on purchasing up to 3 full-size 5.25" > 3.5" bay converters and some extra cooling.
Speaking of cooling, I bought the Scythe KAMA-BAY Black System Cooler which looks great with this case but of course there's no way to install the bugger.
For those of you who like to install ANYTHING other than an optical drive into your 5.25" drive bays; this isn't the case for you. Even if you manage to install what you want to - the door is very unlikely to shut if there are any protruding bits such as fan controller knobs.
