The Cooler Master 932 High Air Flow chassis is
nearly as impressive to work with as it is imposing to look at. It's not pretty
- the Humvee-inspired styling, red fan light, and awkward side panel
styling aren't going to win any design awards (from me anyway). That being said, the HAF 932 has
some admirable features for the performance enthusiast, and when it comes down
to nuts and bolts, geeks who know their PC gaming hardware know what
counts.
Cooler Master have built the HAF 932 with cool in mind -
the case has no less than three 230mm fans, convenient spaces and options
for watercooling, plenty of headroom for tower heatsinks, and can easily accommodate the largest 1500W power supply your credit
card will allow. Overclockers will appreciate all of this, and room
for their own custom gear to support max'd out quad
HD 4870 X2's, an Extreme Edition chip running well into the red, the space
to access the back of the CPU socket without pulling off the
motherboard, and anything really that pumps out a lot of heat.
Cooler Master knows how to make enthusiast grade gear (most of the time),
and in this case the HAF 932 is easy to work inside of and maintain.
The chassis design is largely tool-free, includes some clever mounting methods and
makes it easy to swap out hard drives and optical drives.
All is not roses, the Cooler Master HAF 932
case does have some functional flaws: the lack of air filters
will make this case a liability for owners with dusty
rooms, the inability to mount hard drives using regular screws could become an issue
if the drive caddies ever break or are lost, and the doors
swing open a little too easily once the thumb screws are un done.
Mostly though, its those
wrong-way mounted hard drives that cause the HAF 932 to
lose marks. I'm lazy, you're lazy, we're all lazy. The less doors that need
opening to connect a single hard drive the better... or at least
give us a hot swappable SATA backplane for half those hard drive slots!!
These HAF 932's flaws aren't insurmountable, however,
and veteran PC builders are sure to appreciate Cooler Master's attention to
detail. With a retail price in the region of $160CDN / $150 USD without a power
supply, the Cooler Master HAF 932 case is good value for what you get, and competitively placed compare to equivalent full towers. Most
importantly, the HAF 932 has a lot of room for growth
- with Crossfire X and Quad-SLI setups being introduced, Intel
moving to new 1366-pin sockets and users trying to cram in physics cards, TV
tuners, audio daughter cards, watercooling, blu-ray writers and RAID setups... it is more than
capable of handling an enthusiasts needs for many years to come.
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