Cosmos - My First Impressions

Imy

Imy

Imy

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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.
 
With regards to why there's 3 exhausts and only 1 intake; its to do with creating negative air pressure.

The idea is it causes air to be drawn in via the vents, specifically the one beneath the hard drive area, which draws cool air in, up through/between the hard drives and out the top. The VGA duct is also meant to work in a similar way but due to its orientation I can't see it actually doing a lot.

C64 said:
Any pics ?
Click to expand...
Coolermaster has a micro-site for the Cosmos which has quite a few views on the case.

Also if you google for "coolermaster cosmos review" you'll find a link to a review fairly high up in the results that has tons of pics.

If you want me to take a pic of a particular part of the case let me know.

Edit: Forgot to mention, there's a space (sort of) for a fan above the hard drive bays. which should help cool them down a lot. You'll need a special mounting kit though (which will use up 2 x 5.25" drive bays) or alternatively you can just selotape a fan on its own in that position.
 
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It goes ontop. You screw the fan into a shroud (purchased seperately - but not available atm as far as I can tell) then clip the shroud into place.

file1187762884226.jpg


It won't actively cool the hard drives like a cpu fan does the heatsink. Instead it just helps air come up through the vent at the base of the case; cooling the air around the hard drive enclosures.
 
A lot of modding I'd say. In fact you'd have to completely rip out the hard drive section and put new standard brackets in. The metal casing of the hard drive 'caddies' don't make contact with the hard drives. This means they are not going to act as a heatsink as you would've thought from the photos. The reason for this is because the hard drives are mounted through these rubber rings, which are glued onto the 'caddy' as carefully as McDonald's employees make sure the cheese goes in the middle. After mounting, there is about a 1mm gap between the sides of the hard drive and the sides of the caddy. I'll take a photo of this later.
 
I read on the coolermaster forums some guy removed some of the empty caddies and it made sod all difference to hard drive temps and I can believe that.

Where would you position the fan? If you put it at the front like in most cases, it will just hit a 'brick wall' due to the orientation of the caddies so won't blow over any of the hard disks.
 
My dremel arrived today!



Don't know if I was more excited about this arriving or the Cosmos!

What I've got in mind so far:
  • Cut 2 vertical strips out about 15mm wide on the right hand side of the 5.25" drive bays to provide access to the mounting holes on that side.
  • Cut out the vents at the top of the case where the 2 fans are mounted.
Any other suggestions for mods to the Cosmos?
 
Watching the demonstration video that came with it and watching the sparks fly when cutting metal has me a bit worried now (especially the bit where the cutting blade thing flew off).

I think there are enough fans taking hot air out but an intake right over the graphics card might be a good idea.

Have given it plenty thought and still not sure how I can mod a fan to cool the hard drive area in a useful manner. Its those damn caddies which are causing the problem. Even pondering cutting the entire section out and installing a Lian Li hard drive bay rack with a blowhole in the front of the case. Probably a little too ambitious....
 
Here we go then, my first go with the dremel and first mod in general.

Just to recap, my initial problem was that I wanted to fit 8 hard drives into the Cosmos (which has only 6 hard drive bays) and I wanted to improve the cooling.

I decided to get a Lian Li EX-33A internal HDD bay converter. The idea behind this purchase was that I'd use the top 3 bays of the converter to place my 2 x 15,000 rpm Cheetah hard drives (the hottest running out of the 8), and leave the bottom one free for air flow. I purposely chose the 3in3 converter over the 4in3 converter for better air flow.

I also wanted to have a fan at the front of the case which would draw in cool air to actively cool the cheetahs as well as help draw up air through the Cosmos's hard drive bay area, similar how smoke gets sucked out of a car window when you're having a fag while driving :)

Pics and descriptions of my mod to follow. Click on the images for hi-res versions.


The box and its contents:



HDD Module with fascia removed:



Next the fan was removed. Take note of the rubber grommets and 3-4 pin converter:



I put the module upside down in the clamp and masking taped the areas I wanted to keep:



Using a dremel, I cut out the marked area:
 
Using the dremel again, I smoothed out the nasty rough edges. Hard to tell by the photo but it was smooth enough to slide finger along it:



I then installed blowtrim around the edges to hide the imperfections of my cut and just cuz its cool stuff!



Time to install the drives. First rubber grommets were screwed directly into the drives themselves. The grommets had a slit in them which allowed them to snap into place when installing into the module. Notice I also braided the fan cable:



The module was finally installed into the Cosmos case. It was slid into the bay area via the front and locked into place using the Cosmos's push-button drive locking mechanism. Although in the photo you can see the hdd module behind the Cosmos bay covers, that's purely down to the camera flash.



And now the whole reason of doing this mod becomes clear:



I've probably gone into too much detail over what most will consider a small mod but its my first time and I wanted to record it :)
 
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