Our test system was installed into the Cosmos S to see how it fares in mounting hardware.

The test system consisted of:

On Review: Cooler Master Cosmos S

Installation was pretty straight forward, but not without a few annoyances along the way.

Due to the large height of the Noctua Cooler we used (and there are lots of other tall coolers out there that would have the same problems), the 200mm case side fan did not leave enough clearance for the cooler and stopped the side panel from fitting on.

So I fished the instructions out of the bin, and consulted them to work out how to remove the fan.

The instructions were pretty sketchy and missed out an important step in the removal of the webbing; the instructions showed that the whole plastic web assembly was to be prised out at the 12 points around the edge of the case, but neglected to point out to remove the four screws in the corners first. Once I had worked out that the corner screws had to be removed first it was pretty easy to take out the webbing and remove the 200mm fan.

As I mentioned before, the tool free latch release mechanism for the back panel of the case blocked access to the top holes on the motherboard tray, and made routing cables to the top hole on the panel nearly impossible, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the pre cut hole.

One last thing I should point out is the quick release drive mechanism, while it seems a great idea in theory, in practice it is left wanting. There is no easy way to know if the drive bay holes are in the right place from the side where the quick locks are, and pressing the locks when the drive isn’t in the right place doesn’t give any kind of feedback that the drive isn’t secured. So you are left guessing where the holes are, and have to press the locks quite a few times before they will actually hit the right holes and secure the drives properly.

If the quick locks annoy you that much, you can remove them entirely and use the traditional screws (or just use the screws on the far side of the drive cages), but I found that they work just about well enough to leave them on. Quirks aside, the rest of installation went pretty well and I was able to even find somewhere to neatly shove the majority of unused cables on our UCP 1100W PSU.

Once the Cosmos S was turned on, the touch sensitive power button and stealthy HDD light glow a nice shade of red. The 120mm fans in the case are pretty quiet, and are liveable on full speed.

However I did fire up the 200mm fan to see how much noise that made, and that is too loud for my liking. The web like frame that it is in doesn’t help with the noise and allows the vibrations to pass straight through to the chassis which seems to amplify the noise. If you could mod the fan to use 12v instead of 7v, I’m sure it would become quiet enough not to annoy you.

Next Page - Conclusion

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