Supplemental Restraint Systems for PSU and GPU
Cooler Master has also made some tweaks to the way the PSU and GPU are taken care of in this new chassis. Unfortunately, the PSU shroud is a bit tedious to slide forward and backwards due to the rough chassis finish as the bottom guides bind now and then. However, by sliding it to the back of the chassis, one can remove and replace the PSU shroud when installing extremely large super performance power supplies. And, given the current power requirements of nVidia’s GTX 4xx series video cards, you’re going to need one of them. Hopefully the roughness gets worked out in production.
Speaking of video cards, the VGA shroud is a bit easier to use than the PSU bracket. After removing a couple of thumb screws, you have the option of adding a 120mm cooling fan on the shroud to help cool those massive new cards. The case bundle also includes a card holder that helps support large video cards. These are very nice, yet required, features for transporting systems that have nVidia’s cards installed in SLI. The latest video cards definitely can use the support due to their massive size and weight.
Built for Liquid Cooling
That brings us to the water cooling possibilities inside the HAF X. Gamers and enthusiasts love to mod their systems. One of the biggest obstacles with any case is whether or not the chassis offers enough room to easily get creative with radiators. Fortunately, the top of the case is held in place by six tabs and can easily be removed. This is how one would mount today’s standard dual 120 or triple 120 radiators. The HAF X allows space up to 60mm in depth for these radiators.
Once we remove the cover, we also get a better look at the top 200mm cooling fan. While any fan is better than no fan, it isn’t LED, nor is it a commonly found fan that can just be ordered if you’d like to swap it out. Typically, users can just go to the very affordable Cooler Master Store to order extra parts. Hopefully, we’ll see some optional fans in stock for users who want to add or change out the fans for something more conventional or colorful.
Preliminary Thoughts
Please Check Out the Conclusion to Our Cooler Master HAF X Review Right Here
Being that this is a preview of the Cooler Master HAF X case, there are a couple things engineers could touch up along with the improvements already being made in this chassis. While we can appreciate a rugged outside case finish, it’s the inside that gets a little rough to work around specifically in regards to moving parts, namely the PSU cover. We definitely appreciate the feel of a case that has parts that just “glide” into place.
Performance tests will be left for our all out assault when we finally get our hands on the retail version of this case. However, we do expect the HAF X to do extremely well in the cooling department, just like it’s older HAF 932 brother did. We’re confident that everything we noted as being rough, will be smoothed out in the retail version of the case and we look forward to evaluating noise and cooling performance in detail.
Overall, the Cooler Master HAF X is quite an inspiring computer case. Our prediction is this will be a popular case among gamers and hardcore enthusiasts who like to show off their system. We definitely expect to see it at many LAN party sporting a whole armada of different water cooling configurations. While our preliminary thoughts are mainly positive, we’ll reserve our criticisms and detailed analysis for the final version of this product when we receive the final shipping version of this case.
The Cooler Master HAF X will be available worldwide starting June 15, 2010 and will retail for $199.99 US MSRP.