Accessories and thermal performance
Although there are no front-facing 3.5in drive bays, the case does come with a pair of steel converters that let you install a floppy drive in one of the 5.25in bays. Also provided are a handful of cable-tidies, an extension for Intel eight-pin plugs and a prefitted 24pin-to-24pin PSU extension.
Thermal performance
As you may have already read, we threw out our old hot 'n' toasty test rig a little while ago and replaced it with some new hardware that's more relevant to the current market.
Instead of a 975XBX motherboard from Intel, we're now using copper-adorned chippery in the form of an ASUS P5K Deluxe.
And graphics switched, too. Now, an ATI card powers our pixels. Below are the full specs of what we put inside each chassis for testing.
| HEXUS chassis test equipment specification | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Deluxe |
| Processor | Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66JGHz 1333MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) CellShock DDR2 PC8000 |
| Graphic card | HIS Digital 2900XT PCIe |
| Power supply | Corsair HX620W |
| Hard drive | Hitachi GST 250GB SATA x 2 |
| Optical drive | Pioneer 110 DVD rewriter |
During testing, the ambient temperature was a chilly 19.8 deg C.
After the system booted up, we let it idle for 15 minutes and then took some readings before putting everything through its paces.
We started off by running SiSoft Sandra Pro's burn-in tests - with ATITool running in the background to ensure that the CPU was going at full tilt.
Even accounting for the cooler-than-normal ambient temperature, the COSMOS S returned pretty good results but the disappointment for us was the noise produced. The COSMOS S is one of the noisiest chassis we've had through the labs in quite a while, especially with the side fan connected via Molex (the default configuration) so its speed is not being controlled.
The performance aspect of the RC1100 is fine but Cooler Master has missed a trick by throwing out all the sound proofing when rivals in this market segment make great play of clever noise deadening material.
The noise bothered us enough to take the matter up with Cooler Master but even replacing the standard fans with lower-noise units didn't redeem matters significantly.
Overall, performance was respectable but the noise was too loud to be bearable, especially under load.