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Cooler Master Cosmos II Extreme Gaming Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2012-01-03
cosmos - from coolermaster is here it was very very difficult for me to get up onto the table because this excel etx monstrosity weighs almost 50 pounds so it's very large it's actually probably the biggest case I've yet encountered in terms of the size of the box so make sure if you're going to take one of these home you know happen to have any other stuff in your car that could interfere with it taking up probably most of if not the entire trunk of your vehicle very very big you know why don't we have a brief rundown of the specifications and features on the outside of the box before we open it up and I'll take a break off-camera to get it out of the box and then we'll have a look at the inside so we've got rich i/o support will cover that once it's open supports 200 millimeter fan times 1 140 milton's 2 + 120 mil times 3 and that is in the top so it's either triple 120 s - 140 s or a single 200 removable up upper fan filter actually has removable fan filters in a couple places 11 tooless hard drive and SSD base supports four-way SLI crossfire yeah with ten plus one expansion slots at better individual airflow chamber so it is a compartmentalized style case um here we go there that's the summary brushed aluminum and steel for strength and elegance stylish and streamlined race car inspired design ok airflow optimized design we'll see about that once we open it up it supports a dual water cooling loops and I'll show you guys that later advanced system panel of fan speed and fan LED control in a rich i'll panel with 2 USB 3 ports here we've got the general specifications of what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get my camera to kind of look at this and then you guys can pause the video if you really want to read it I'm just going to talk about the case I've extracted it from the box now and you can see that even in the thinnest parts the phone which is not an a closed cell foam it's a riddle phone so it's not as ideal as as a softer phone would be that you can see that my case arrived in one piece which is always a good sign and at its thinnest points it's about an inch and a half and at the corners which is where most of the impact is going to happen that's going to be at least three inches from the corner to the corner of the case right there giving it adequate protection in the event of a fall oh there's a cat in the box he seems to be okay a little bit traumatized but otherwise fine so case is covered in plastic to prevent scratches and then you can see there's a fair bit of other little miscellaneous bits here so I'm going to remove these off-camera and then we're going to have a closer look at the cosmos too it comes with a user manual which is in a variety of languages and let's have a look at the exterior of the cosmos - to start with so you're going to see right here up at the top we've got these stylish carrying bars and you will need them you will have to hold onto these when you are moving this around especially once you've fully loaded the case with all of your system components we've also got a sliding cover for the controls at the front so this is controlling your front top harddrive GPU and LED for your fan so it's controlling your fans as well as the LEDs you've got a reset switch a power switch a hard drive and a power indicator LED so that's all covered up here's your front i/o there's actually a little easier to reach when you move that back as well it has a very satisfying thump to it when you move it back and forth I like that so we've got a microphone and headphone jack here eSATA 2 USB 3 SuperSpeed and 4 USB 2 in the front we find three five and a quarter inch bays and two locking three and a half inch hot-swap days as well very cool actually and then here we've got a cleanable fan filter although I'm not 100% sure how to get it off this is my first go at this with this case you know what why don't we finish off the exterior appearance for here so on the side we find a gorgeous brushed aluminum finish a very very uniform very even and then we have what looks kind of it I mean I guess they're saying racing-inspired but to me it looks more like the claw marks of a beast or something and that is the side panel ventilation so you can see there is a filter installed in there some kind of mesh so you'd be able to clean it off it's not just going to take dust directly into your case and once we open it up we're going to find out what is inside there in terms of cooling potential the bars on the bottom the bars on the bottom have rubber feet installed so while you can put it down without risking damaging the surface below it I would still not really drag the cosmos to around because you can potentially damage the surface that is sitting on with those bars so having my table just detached on the bottom here so hopefully it doesn't collapse while I'm filming on the back here we've got a 140 or 120 ml fan some water cooling grommets we've got 10 PCI expansion slots plus one so you can throw like a cathode inverter switch there or something along those lines we have an adapter piece that comes out with thumb screws and then a power supply mount that actually sticks out a little bit from the back and then finally on the other side we find a slightly different approach to the animal claw mark thing that was going on on the other side panel and these ones have yep the same filtered ventilation holes and I think we are ready to open this baby up to open up the side panel all you do is click this latch right here and it pops off it is on a hinge which is really nice for working on cases like this one where they're very very heavy so you don't have to worry about what to do with your side panel the sturdy construction here is not going to have any problem with the weight of this panel which is very very heavy and very very thick so okay this looks like once I remove these screws I can take this off and that'll take off these filters there so that's pretty straightforward but why is this so sick though I guess because of the layered design you've got a plastic layer we've got what appears to be some kind of a that looks like some kind of metal or plastic construction and we've got the aluminum piece on the outside which should be great for noise isolation as well you guys so I've actually opened it up backwards so we're going to start on this side so you can see we've got a huge CPU cutaway we've got huge holes for for mount for mounting for managing cables so you up here you can easily fit two 8-pin EPS connectors and if you're buying a case like this there's a chance you might be buying a motherboard that has two eight pins no problem they thought of that if it happens to be positioned somewhere else we've got another cable management hole up here and then we've got all of the usual ones using I might add a very high quality grommet you can see it bounces right back into place as soon as I move away even if you take it and really heave on it it goes right back into place so that's really good to see as well and we have two full banks of these which will help accommodate a couple different widths of motherboards depending on where you need to run your cables we can also see that there is ample space behind the motherboard tray behind the drive cages for running any kinds of cables that you could pretty much possibly see fit I mean here to give you guys some idea here's where your power supply is going to sit on a nice little foam piece here for noise isolation and you've got a good I mean that's well over an inch of space next to it to run cables over here to the drives as well as to run cables up here to the motherboard and the rest of the components I'm just going to tilt this a little bit there we go to give you guys better angle we've got one two three four five six jessyca you can stay back it's okay I'm just counting one two three four five six harddrive cages down here five more here and then we've got those two hot swappable ones up in the top there's a 200 mil cooling fan comes installed with a 120 mil but you can put another 200 mil up there and I think oh yeah here we go if here's another filtered fan intake under the power supply where it's going to be exhausting out the back of the case from there so why don't we turn it around and have a look at the the business side of the in this case so I was investigating the top and found out how easy it is to remove the top panel you can see here that it has a fan filter that is built-in and the whole thing is held on by only one thumb screw so what that means I'm holding the thumb screw here yeah so what that means is that you can gain easy access here I'm just going to tip this forward so the lights better for you anyway so you can gain Oh as much as I can there we go so you can gain easy access to the single 240 mil dual 140 mil or 200 mil 200 mil sorry dual 140 ml or triple 120 mil which is fully water cooling ready and you can see the spacing allows for some forgiveness on either side which means it should be very compatible with a variety of different radiators from different manufacturers because of that leeway that they've left in for you up there which is great there's also very little restriction on the fans themselves because this is very open and then other than that there's absolutely nothing in the way cooler master was actually a pioneer in the whole built-in support for water cooling thing until Coolermaster really started taking it seriously with cases like the cosmos and the half 9:32 water cooling support was usually some rubber grommets in the back of the case which to me does not mean water cooling support because maybe one of it every 20 water cooled builds you see online uses an external radiator and the rest people are trying to do them internally so Coolermaster really I believe started that trend in a big way compared to the other major case guys now speaking of a big way this is a big lot of internal cables holy cow look at this okay so here's our front panel cables where we've got our internal USB three header I'm good to see that style being used we have our internal HD audio USB 2 x 2 so that's total of four ports and our eSATA then we've also got ha ha 2 data connections and 2 power connections for our hot swap bays which I showed you from the front these are quite solidly constructed actually right that was one of the other things I wanted to show you guys about this I want to show you how these carry handles are connected to the case so you can see actually you will have to come over up top on this one you can see they're bolted in and they've got some serious reinforcement going on here even with your system fully loaded up I would not expect there to be any give in these and you'll be very able to move your system around as long as you have the Hat the physical strength for it because it is quite heavy all right so here we have I'll have to find out what these are looks like some kind of dual 120 millimeter thing though yeah we'll figure that out in a bit okay we've also got some other included actually all let's finished with the cables okay here we go the instructions for this case are actually surprisingly detailed with really good pictures we find out how many languages that it's in saw very efficient so I figured out what these are it actually comes by default with the ability to remove all these bottom cages and these are the 240 millimeter radiator brackets that you will need in order to install a dual 120 rad in the bottom so here these are four fan LEDs so this is for the LED controller if you have fans that use these particular cables then you'll need them and if you don't then you won't be able to have LED control you'll have to take this whole thing in kind of tuck it away somewhere which is what I would do because none of the fans that I particularly like use that use that system this is something that's really smart though check this up so they we've got our top fan controller we've got our harddrive fan one we've got our GPU fan one and we've got our front fan one they've actually broken it out into how many of that particular fan you might need to control so rather than locking you down to the configuration the case comes with four the fan controller which I've seen in the past which is just mind-boggling they've gone they've included however many you will need to plug it in to each individual fan so that's a really smart thing that cooler masters done on this case to give users the best possible flexibility for their configuration here's our hard drive LED power switch and reset switch so looks like no um no power led fascinating yes it's got it figured out some other way so that's it for the point table so that brings us to some of the other internal features so one of them is the tool is five and a quarter inch base here so we've got three of them that we have those hot swaps you've also got not these so these are really easy to use cooler masters design is actually excellent you can see if there's a lot of flex to it but as soon as you put a drive in there it just gets totally rigid and works incredibly well for keeping your hard drive installed you don't even need tools because you got these little these little nubs right here so you just bend it out put the drive in clip it in slide it in and then lock it into place so that's how you install a drive in this particular case and then the way to get access to those bottom ones is you just go ahead and let's see there we go nope this piece yep so there's your two 120mm fans and there's your six additional three and a half inch or 2.5 inch remember these are all compatible with two and a half inch SSDs should you see fit to hold the case up with a whole ton of SSD so modifications you can make you can actually just by removing these two screws and removing all these cages you can remove this entire hard drive cage here there's something you want to install there if you want to make some kind of modifications to the case you can completely remove this whole bottom cage this here as well in order to install these radiator brackets in order to put a 240 ml rat radiator down in the bottom which would allow you to do two separate loops you have all the room in the world for a couple reservoirs and pumps 360 rad in the top 240 rad in the bottom speaking of which that is another smart thing cooler masters done with this cases they've actually built in cable management grommets between the bottom chamber and the bottom chamber and the top chamber so you can keep your segmented separated airflow thing going but you can actually run things from the bottom up to the top which is something that I run into with a couple cases in the past that have used this compartmentalize design and not give an adequate space to run things like water cooling tubing from one place to another it just allows you to be a little bit tidier with something like that so I mentioned before excel ATX is also compatible with EXO that's why we have cable grommet our cable management grommets out here as well as ones over here coolermaster mentions that it's four-way SLI and for Wii crossfire compatible and it better be because if you take to usually excel ATX motherboards start here so you got two four six eight yes it is fully capable of doing that I mean I think we're at the practical limits on how many video cards people would want to install in a system so Cooper masters pretty much got the bases covered there I couldn't figure out immediately how to get the door off the side of the case but it turns out it's really easy you just take it and lift it off and it's just got these four little metal pieces right here that slip into place and are held up by the hinge design right here sorry I'm just going to put that on for the sake of demonstrating to you guys how easy it is to put back on huh I was faster the first time this is only my second time putting it back on the go yeah back in place and not going anywhere anymore which is very cool let me just see if there's anything that I've missed inside here so basically in a nutshell you can install as much hardware as you want three five and a quarter inch devices along with thirteen three and a half or two and a half inch devices you can install up to a triple radiator in the top and a dual in the bottom and then I call man I'd imagine if you get a little bit more creative you could probably do a couple tools in the bottom you could do a larger radiator like a 140 here in the front you can do another 120 or 140 here in the back and yeah you could have all the water cooling nests that you could possibly fit although it might not be very portable at that point that's how you put all those radiators inside you can install pretty much whatever motherboard you want as many video cards as you want and as long a power supply as you want ultimately this is an ultimate style case it is not for the faint of heart it is not for installing your your sort of daily driver machine this is for a gaming system and I think that pretty much covers everything I'll show you some of the accessories here we've got our speaker we've got our mounting screws and grommets and standoffs and all that good stuff couple included cable management pieces these are so handy Thank You Coolermaster for including these check this out so you just do that pull them tight and you can use these to mount cables wherever you want they've just got double sided foamy tape on the back so we got four of those five of those they also include a whole bunch of black cable ties so you pretty much won't need anything with this case other than what's included Coolermaster already knows that you might not be able to reach with your 8 pin connector so they included one that is going to be long enough to get you darn near halfway from the top of the case down to your power supply so pretty much no matter what kind of power supply you have you'll be able to get your system going right away although personally I'd replace this with something sleeped because if you're going to have a case that looks really nice like this on the inside you're probably going to want to stay looking nice and not be covered in this speaking of which there is no windowed side panel on this case for now but there could potentially be a windowed side panel available for purchase in the future as an add-on to to this case and yes fan fan placement so I mentioned the triple 120 s in the top the 140 in the back you got your power supply fan you've got your dual 120 s here which are totally removable you can just take them off very easily here you can also mount an additional 120 millimeter fan here for to a pull more air through these hard drives to help out the 200 mil that's here in the front you can do to 120 s here on the side and I think that pretty much covers it so don't forget to subscribe for latest tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thank you for tuning in on this special showcase the Coolermaster cosmos 2 ultimate head
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