Cooler Master MasterBox 5 – Canada Model – Review

The story of Cooler Master is an easy one; they want to be the company that meets your needs. Regardless if you are a casual user, hobbyist, gamer or filmmaker they want to seem like the perfect fit for you. As you may have seen in the past with our review of the MasterCase 5 from December of last year, they are all about becoming modular. This is great as everyone has their own style and when you’re building your computer you should always have a bit of your personality put into it.

UNBOXING, CONTENTS & PRICING

As we have come to see with most cases the need for flashy retail packaging is vacant and really is a fading trend. No longer are companies in need of catching your eye on the retail shelf and are more showing you what is inside the packaging well before you get to the purchase  phase. Your standard cardboard box with black inked art showing you the purchased case on the front and around the back you’ll get a look at look at the two variations. One with OD bay slots and one without.

Opening the box you’ll see the case secured between two foam pads accompanied by the warranty booklet, manual and accessories.Popping the case out you’ll notice right away it’s lightweight structure. The overall build of the Masterbox 5 is a steel frame and panels with a plastic front panel.

As you can see we are working with the optical bay drive version of the Masterbox 5 today from the two mesh divisions above the fan support space. The I/O panel consists of two USB 3.0 ports, a power button, headphone and mic port and a reset button on the far right. Along the top panel you’ll see the front is covered steel with mesh at the back to house cooling support up to 140mm

A good mention goes to the fact that the mesh fan cover pops off very easily with a pull at the bottom and you can install your cooling support without removing the whole front panel. This is great because the I/O panel is attached to the front panel and personally we don’t like having to manipulate the cover while working in the front due to wires. The front panel does pop off but is quite stiff and took us a while to remove as we felt the pressure we were putting on it was going to break it.

Turning to the component panel, where you will spend the majority of your time building your PC. The included panel is steel and both sides are inter-changeable so you don’t have to worry about mixing them up. There is a window panel available as a separate accessory for the US version but should be easily acquired online.As you can see the inside of chassis is quite spacious. The OD bay’s, 3.5 bay’s at the bottom as well as the PSU cover are all removable, leaving you with a completely empty chassis if you so choose. As you can see the accessories removed the chassis is completely open for you to adapt and build to fit your components and aesthetic ideas. The Masterbox 5 will house an air cooler with a max height of 167mm, liquid cooling up to 280mm (360mm with bracket), VGA up to 410mm. However, choosing some options will limit others. We will get into that in more detail a little later on.

Around to the cable management side you’ll get a good look at the ample amount of room you’re given. between 25-35mm of depth throughout the back guarantees whether you’re running bundled or flat cables that you will be able to move and wire your rig freely. Also, the plethora of tie-offs will make it even easier to keep control of the chaos that we all know can happen back there.

You’ll also notice up at the top right there is a CPU cable cut out to make feeding your CPU power cable that much easier. There is also the six routing squares on the left hand side to ensure no matter what your configuration that you have room to keep everything flowing and tidy. The massive rear cut out for cooler installation doesn’t need much introduction either.

The rear panel is fairly basic showing you motherboard face-plate slot along with seven pci-e slots, the bottom cover is a peripheral, locking plate to help keep your peripherals secure.The one included 120mm fan is pre-setup for exhaust at the rear and that is the largest you can go for that space. The bottom dust cover also slides out from under the PSU easily here.

The MSRP on the Masterbox 5 is set at $89.99. Which puts it in budget range at the under $100 mark but with minimal accessories and only one 120mm fan included seems maybe a bit high for us.