Cooler Master HAF932 AMD-Edition Review

Cooler Master introduced the original HAF 932 "high air flow" case in 2008, but they're no stranger to the case market, having sold computer cases for many years. Most of their earlier cases were expensive, all-aluminum creations that many hackers still prize. In the past few years, they've been moving their design and manufacturing expertise to less-expensive steel cases and now offer a full range of cases with prices ranging from $50 to more than $500 for custom-painted aluminum versions. The HAF 932 AMD Edition is the first AMD-themed case they've offered.

It's not the first manufacturer-themed Cooler Master case, though: they currently have three NVIDIA-themed cases. The standard Cooler Master HAF 932 case sets a high bar for functionality and value. How will this case stack up?

HAF932 AMD Edition Features

• The HAF932 AMD edition features a fully-rugged appearance and is housed in a tough casing to offer outstanding protection
• AMD dragon on acrylic side panel
• Patented finger-press buttons for quickly maintaining or upgrading 5.25 inch drive devices
• Removable HDD racks and cable management system for better cable routing and neatness
• Easy access to liquid coolant fills port
• Meshed back slot for providing passive cooling
• Independent air intake designed for bottom-mounted PSU or installation of two 120mm fans
• Retaining holes for easy installation of CPU coolers

AM-932-RWN1-GP Specifications

About Cooler Master

Cooler Master was founded with the mission of providing the industry'sbest thermal solutions. Since its establishment a decade ago, the company has remained faithful to this mission, emerging as a world leader in products and services for companies dealing with deviceswhere heat issues must be resolved.

In pursuing this mission,Cooler Master is absolutely committed to delivering solutions thatprecisely meet customer requirements for features, performance, andquality. Moreover, we strive to be a reliable long-term partner for ourcustomers that they can truly depend on. Cooler Master aims to be thefirst and foremost name that comes to mind for companies around theworld seeking thermal solutions, and seeks to build such a reputationthrough outstanding technology, sophisticated design, and superiorservice.

Cooler Master's current business encompasses acomprehensive lineup of thermal solutions for a full range ofapplications. Our products range from heat sinks and fans to componenthousing, chassis, and ducting for computers, industrial machinery,telecommunications equipment, and many other devices.

A critical component of Cooler Master's ability to successfully pursue its missionis an unstinting commitment to quality, as demonstrated by the ISO 9001certification granted to its main manufacturing plant in Taiwan. Wehave also enforced ISO guidelines and is in the process of applying forISO 9002 certification at its second and third plants, located inChina. Cooler Master has also implemented a number of analytical andtesting protocols to ensure top quality, including at subcontractors,to further ensure thorough quality control. Moreover, Cooler Master'sdedication to quality extends beyond manufacturing to every aspect ofits operation, including service.

Closer Look: HAF AMD Exterior

The Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition is not for the introverted. The fascia is molded red plastic, not painted, and covers the entire front of the case and extends to cover part of the top of the case.

It's unlikely your monitor can do this color justice. It's not just red, it's RED: screaming red. Fire-engine red (before they started using that weird lemon-lime color). Deadly danger warning light red. It's so bright it almost seems internally backlit. Whew! Anyway. The front of the case has six removable bezels for 5.25" devices. Below the device bays is a large intake grille for the 230mm intake fan. Which, I might add, also has red LEDs.

The left side of the standard HAF 932 holds another of these giant fans, but the AMD Edition replaces it with a windowed side panel with a dragon imprint. At the lower front of this panel are five ventilation slots.

Moving to the rear of the case, we see space for a bottom-mounted power supply, 7 card slots, a 140mm exhaust fan, and grommeted holes for an external water cooling system.

The right side of the case is a plain black panel with some cable relief moldings and the same ventilation slots as the other side.

The top of the case showcases another 230mm fan (also lit with red LEDs), as well as a depressed area with a rubber mat, which serves as a handy place for your keys, change, and iPhone.

Join me in the next section as I take a closer look at the exterior details of this intriguing case.

Detailed Exterior Features

Just in case you missed that this was the AMD Edition, the front panel badge of the Cooler Master AM-932-RWN1-GP reminds you. I wonder if there's a penalty for using another processor? Is using an X3 OK? How about an Athlon?

The bay covers for the six front 5.25" device bays snap off easily: just press the latch at the side with your finger.

The front I/O panel has four USB connectors (thankfully spaced far enough apart so that plugging in multiple items is possible), a IEEE 1394 "Firewire" port, an E-SATA port, and microphone and speaker ports. The power and drive activity LEDs are red (of course), and very bright.

Underneath the rubber mat on top of the case is a fill port, should you have a bay reservoir whose fill port matches up.

But this isn't all. There's more to come..

HAF932 AMD Extra Features

Cooler Master's HAF cases are all about "high air flow", but they haven't forgotten you water cooling folks. Looking closely at the top of the case we can see that there are mounting points for a dual-120mm radiator or two 120mm fans (of course in either case you'd have to remove the included 230mm fan). But if you look toward the front of the case, you'll see some vents at the back of the case top. What could these be for?

Removing three screws under the rubber mat on top of the case allows the case top to come off...revealing mounts for another 120mm fan! Air directed upwards from this fan would exit via the vents we see above.

With the case top removed, we can see that the Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition has accommodations for a full triple-120mm radiator. Of course you'd have to remove the existing 230mm fan to mount one.

As long as we've the top off, let's remove the front bezel as well. Once this is done, we can see the six twist-out shields for the 5.25" bays and the unfiltered 230mm intake fan. I was able to remove the top four shields without losing any blood, which is better than I usually do.

OK, let's take a look at the interior.

Closer Look: AM932 Interior

The Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition can accommodate micro-ATX, standard ATX, and extended ATX motherboards. There are plenty of routing holes and tie-down points for cable management, and a large opening under the CPU socket area to mount a backplate for a third party CPU cooler or water block without having to remove your motherboard. You can choose to mount a power supply at the top of the case by removing the existing back plate and upper fan. This would leave plenty of room for a water cooling pump and reservoir at the bottom of the case. You could even install two power supplies.

Inside the case is a box containing the case accessories. There's a set of casters to replace the stock case feet; a baggie of screws and zip ties, as well as a small speaker to plug into your motherboard; a 3.5" device bay cover, a 3.5" device bay adapter, and an eight-pin EPS-12V extension cable, a nice touch since the connector on your motherboard will probably be at the top of the case, and the power supply at the bottom. However, this connector might not fit a four-pin EPS socket if there are components next to it on your motherboard. Disappointingly, there's no mounting solution provided for 2.5" devices such as SSDs.

At the rear of the case we can see the 7 slots for your expansion boards, the 140mm rear exhaust fan, and the power supply mounting area. In a case this large, it would have been nice to see an 8-slot backplane; as it is, a tri-SLI or tri-Crossfire system would probably require you to mount your power supply at the top of the case. The bottom of the case is vented, but again there are no air filters.

Looking at the right side of the case, we have another view of the cable routing and tie-down points. The motherboard tray in this case is not removable, but the large size of the case and the excellent cable routing mean this feature isn't missed much.

There's plenty of room behind the motherboard tray and drive bays for cables...you won't have to force the side panel on.

Let's taker a closer look at the interior in the next section.

Detailed Interior Features

As befits such a large case, there's plenty of room for your devices in the Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition, with 6 5.35" bays and 5 3.5" bays. Push-button locking retainers secure 5.25" devices on one side only; for devices where you might have to exert some pressure on the front, such as card readers, adding a screw or two on the other side is a good idea. This shot shows an optical drive in the top bay, an ASUS ROG OC Station in the next two bays, and a card reader mounted in the supplied 3.5" adapter in the fourth bay, along with two hard drives in the 3.5" bays.

3.5" hard drives snap into a drive caddy, which in turn slides into the drive cage and locks into place when you fold the lever down.

The Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition uses the same toolless card retention mechanism seen in other Cooler Master cases. Note the "lip" on front of the retaining latch that keeps your card back plate tight against the back of the case. The screw holes are threaded in case you need to use a screw, which will come in handy as we'll see later.

Looking up towards the inside top of the case, we see the 230mm upper exhaust fan and upper power supply mount.

The power supply rests on a raised stand with plenty of (unfiltered) ventilation holes under it. Just ahead of the power supply area are mounting points for an additional 120mm fan. If you choose to mount a power supply at the top of the case, you can remove the power supply stand and mount another 120mm fan there.

A nice touch: as with many cases, the included fans have both 3-pin motherboard connectors and 4 pin Molex connectors. However, the Molex connectors may be easily removed, so you don't have them dangling in the case if you decide to use the 3 pin connectors.

The inside dimensions of the case are 20.5" from the top to the bottom; 8.5" from the motherboard tray to the side panel, and 13" from the backplane slots to the 3.5" device bays. You won't have any trouble fitting your Radeon 5970 into this case.

In the next section, I'll show you what it's like to build a system in this case.

Building the HAF AMD System

I'm a firm believer in building a system in any case I review; I almost always find things during a build that weren't obvious simply looking at the case. Since this is an AMD-themed case, I used an ASUS Crosshair III motherboard, an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor, two XFX Radeon HD5770 video cards, and 4GB of OCZ AMD Black Edition memory. A Seasonic X750 Gold power supply provides the juice, and a Titan Fenrir "Christmas Edition" heatsink (chosen because its red matches the case) cools the overclocked CPU. The size of the Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition makes building a system pretty easy, even without a removable motherboard tray. There's so much interior room that you're never short of work space, as the photo below shows.

The large holes for the release snaps on the 5.25" drive bay covers make popping them off easy, but allow your devices to show through. It's not bad if your devices are black, but the silver metal of the Plextor Blu-ray drive is visually jarring. Fortunately, Cooler Master provides a sheet of black stickers you can use to cover anything showing through.

I ran into a problem installing the XFX Radeon HD5770 video cards. A small tab on the card, shown below, interfered with the lip of the retaining latch Cooler Master uses. I could use the lower of the two latches needed for the card, but the upper clip would not latch down. I left it up and secured the card with a screw. The plastic latches work well enough otherwise, but with a large, heavy double-slot video card like a GTX280 or Radeon 5870, you might want to use screws anyway.

That was the only problem I ran into during the build. Just cleaning up the cabling behind the motherboard took more time; in just a couple of hours, I was ready to go. We're looking good from the front...

...but the dragon imprint on the side window is all but invisible when you have components in the case. Interior lights make the situation even worse. A laser-etched or engraved design, with a frosted-white appearance, would have been much more visible, especially with internal lighting.

My final thoughts and conclusion follow in the next section.

HAF932 AMD Final Thoughts

I've been in the computer industry since the early 1980s. Back then, the standard computer case was a mild steel interior surrounded with a beige plastic shell. Even purpose built cast industrial foam cases like the ones used by early Apple ][ computers and the long-forgotten Corvus Concept were the same shade of beige. Styling as an end in itself for a computer case has crept in slowly over the years, with occasional dramatic one-offs and the eventual brand styling used today by companies like Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. The original HAF 932 design in all black is dramatic enough; but the ADM Edition pushes to boundaries further, perhaps too far for some. Personally, I liked it a lot, while my wife thinks it's "silly."

A case this large and with this much expansion capabilities seems almost wasted in the AMD consumer space. Unlike the "extended ATX" and E-ATX form factors we've seen in some Intel X58 boards, top-end AMD 790FX boards easily fit within the standard ATX form factor. A dual-Opteron server motherboard would fit, though, and a system with two 6-core "Istanbul" Opterons in this case would be rather cool, if very expensive.

The trend in extreme air cooling these days is cases with their interiors divided into "thermal zones": a zone for the power supply; a zone for the video cards and hard drives, and a final zone for everything else. Cooler Master sticks with the ATX standard "air in at the bottom front, air out at the top and rear" cooling path, but they're moving enough air that I don't think the zone concept would provide any better cooling.

It's disappointing that all the air intakes are unfiltered. The amount of air this case moves ensures that you'll be blowing the dust out of the interior more frequently than you'd like. The case has more exhaust fan capacity than intake fan capacity, which would normally mean it would be a "negative pressure" case, but there's so much ventilation at the front, top, back, and bottom of the case that you'll never see any pressure differential. The case does do without the 230mm side fan of the standard HAF 932, which might be useful in some situations such as tri-SLI setups, but really, this case provides enough ventilation to handle just about anything you throw at it.

AM-932-RWN1-GP Conclusion

I don't have any statistics, but I'd imagine that full-tower cases— those that can handle E-ATX motherboards and a lot of devices— represent a very small and diminishing segment of the computer market. Full-tower cases appeal to very few users, but you know who you are. The advent of cheap terabyte hard drives means that most people don't need 5 hard drive bays, but you might have a few 150g Raptors lying around that you want to RAID. Most builders don't see the need for twin optical drives, a dual-bay reservoir, a fan controller, and a card reader all in the same computer...but you do. You can put the power supply at the bottom, or at the top; or use two power supplies, or a power supply at the bottom and a radiator at the top, or a power supply at the top, a radiator in front or back or top or bottom, and a pump and reservoir somewhere else....heck, there's enough room for two power supplies and a complete water cooling system with a twin-120mm radiator at the top.

I'm not that extreme. But with case like this, I judge performance by the ease of building in it; the amount of cooling provided, and the amount of expansion capability. After all, these are the main reasons to buy a full-tower case! The Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition receives top marks here. A removable motherboard tray would have been nice, but I have to admit I didn't miss it much.

The appearance of this case will be polarizing: I liked it, but I'm a computer geek; I suspect many people will find it too dramatic. But they're not the intended audience. The AMD theme limits the market even further, since nobody would buy this case and build an Intel/NVIDIA system in it. I don't think so, anyway.

The construction is up to Cooler Master's usual high standards. It doesn't have the Swiss-watch finish of their much more expensive aluminum cases, but the steel and plastic parts all look good and fit together well. Given the cost of this case, a finished interior would have been nice, as this feature is becoming common on much less expensive cases.

Functionally, this case is almost perfect. Improvements are certainly possible: for example, it would be nice to have a SATA backplane for the 3.5" drive bays, but that would have raised the cost of the case substantially.

The original Cooler Master HAF 932 is considered a good value at $159.99; this case sacrifices a small amount of functionality (the side panel fan) but gives you a little exclusivity and a bunch of bling for only $10 more. Frankly, I'm happy to see something that isn't yet another solid black computer case (black is the new beige), so I think it represents a good value, as well as being interesting from a geek-tech point of view. I was impressed with the fit, finish, features, and functionality; and the AMD branding was a fun extra. As of December 2009 the Cooler Master HAF932 AMD-Edition case (model AM-932-RWN1-GP) is available for $169.99 from either NewEgg or FrozenCPU. if you like the case but prefer something a little more understated, the original HAF 932 is on sale at the reduced price of $139.99 for a very limited time.

Pros:

Cons:

- Striking appearance may be too much for some
- Unfiltered intake fans
- No mounting solutions for 2.5" devices
- Card retaining latches don't work with some video cards
- Dragon imprint not readily visible in a built system

Ratings:

• Performance: 8.50
• Appearance: 9.00
• Construction: 9.00
• Functionality: 9.00
• Value: 8.50

Final Score: 8.8 out of 10.

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Silver Tachometer Award.

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