Cooler Master HAF 500 Midi Tower Noir

Superior cooling will put the Cooler Master HAF 500 case atop many buyers' shopping lists, but its good looks and great ventilation come at a cost: lack of filters and lightweight build quality.

The screws on the side-doors aren't very well aligned on the full-metal side; shavings of metal keep curling up when I screw them back on and I have to literally use a screwdriver to get them to fit whereas on the other side I can hand-screw them on no problem. On the plus side, this mammoth of a case fits all my parts in magnificently. Keeps it stupid cool as well. On my old case I was constantly running my temp up to 70-80c when trying to play basically anything, now I can't seem to get it to run over 40c with the stock fans and my water cooler system.

Other than the shipping damage, "broken plastic side panel", I love the case! Easy install with plenty of room for the Noctua cooler

I am using ASUS Z10PE-D8WS dual Xeon motherboards in 2 server builds. Although this is an XL-ATX motherboard capable case, the mounting hole layout of the ASUS board does NOT match the pre-drilled standoff holes in the case. The entire center edge section length of the board, next to the case top edge, will lie unsupported if you are unable to locate a couple of plastic stand-offs to mount into the holes on that side of the motherboard. Plastic stand off spacers are not provided by CoolerMaster. Otherwise, that underside motherboard edge will contact the interior of the case, shorting the board, without something to keep the board from sagging. I have used this style of Coolermaster HAF with great success if the past when using Intel motherboards. Unfortunately, those boards were too difficult to come by in the time frame I had to build out the 2 servers. With the number of large fans available in this case, I've never had a heat issue, even running large RAID5 arrays in the case.

Awesome tower, it is large but that made it easy to work inside, and it looks impressive next to my desk.