Introduction

Coolermaster recently launched their latest high end enclosure, the COSMOS, it’s an expensive piece of equipment build with silence and performance in mind, the spotlights of the enthusiast have been on this case for months and first reviews are now appear on the web. While we are stress testing our Cosmos sample we got a chance to look at a more affordable case from Coolermaster, the less spectacularly named CM 690. The name doesn’t mean much, but we’re sure it will pop up on the radar of people looking for a sub $100 case.

You’ve read it correctly, the CM 690 is a brand new mid tower case stuffed with plenty of features and comes with 3x120mm fans preinstalled, all this for a low price of €76 in Europe, and even as low as $70 in the USA! It’s been a while since we have seen such a lower priced enclosure from Coolermaster, it’ll be interesting to see what they offer us at this price point.

Yes it a steel case, comes in one color: Black



Specifications

Let’s go right to the gritty details:



The CM-690 is a heavy case, made from sturdy metal chassis this is no surprise, inside you can fit ATX or Micro ATX motherboard, you have 5x 5.25” drive bays available at the front, one can be turned into an exposed 3.5” bay (floppy/multimedia card reader). You can fit up to five 3.5” hard drives in the custom rack. At the top you find I/O panel with support for not only USB/Firewire/(HD) Audio, but also eSATA!

Coolermaster did not neglect cooling of the CM 690, no sir! You can fit up to 8 fans in this case of different sizes. Quickly summed up, you get one 120mm LED fan preinstalled in the front, one none-led 120mm in the back, and one 120mm non-led in the side panel. The side panel can hold 2x120mm or 2x140mm fans. The top panel can also hold 2x120mm or 2x140mm, the bottom panel also has plug and play installation for 1x140mm or one 120mm fan. Still not enough? In the rear panel there is room for one low profile 80mmx15mm fan to provide cooling to the back of the motherboard.

The specifications alone won’t be a deciding factor of course, so let’s take the CM 690 for a test drive and explore the features and find out how if performs ->

Size comparison

First up let’s compare size of the CM 690, looking at the case from the front, it towers of similar priced ATX enclosures like the Ultra Grid, Zirconium and 3D Storm, size wise it’s more on par with the Antec 900 case.



Looking from the side we can get an idea of the depth this case provides, compared to Coolermaster’s own Stacker 830 EVO the CM 690 is noticeably smaller, on par with the Antec P182B and slight larger than the Antec Nine hundred.



Outside Look

The most likely façade you will be staring at is the front, so here it is in full glory:



You get two aluminum color strips which go from the front to the back of the case, in between a complete grill covering again top to front. The bottom part of the grill features a plastic grill right behind it; you can’t really make out the LED fan sitting there. The 5.25” bay covers are individual pieces.

The left side panel is nothing too special, except for those two extremely large cut-outs with grill, allowing you to fit 80/92/120/140mm size fan, default you get one pre-installed in the bottom area.



The right side panel also features a cut-out grill sitting over the CPU area of the motherboard:



The top panel reveals the I/O interface as well as the transparent grill at the back of the case where two up to 140mm fans can be installed:



More on the next page ->

Outside Look Continued

The I/O panel on the Coolermaster CM 690 is quite feature rich for a budget minded enclosure, we are not too surprised to find one or two USB connections on most cases, audio in/out is also quite common. Firewire is not installed on all products in this price range so it’s certainly nice to see one here, but what really “takes the cake” is the eSATA connection sitting there right on top, this is a feature that even the more expensive Stacker 830 has not!



The bottom of the case is quite interesting too, in the photo below you can see two cut-out grills, one in the middle for 80/92/120/140mm fan, and one in the rear of the power supply unit.



To allow fresh air to be pulled in from the bottom, the case is lifted of the ground by uses of these hard (but not too hard) rubber feet:



The power/HDD led is situated at the right side corner of the case, as well as the power and reset button:



Last photo before we open the case up: the back-side reveals stock 1x120mm fan installed, as well as the location of the PSU which is at the bottom:

Look inside

The side panels can be easily removed by removing 2 thumb screws at each side; we found them to be a very very secure fit, requiring quite a bit of effort to remove them.

A small cardboard box is inside which holds the following goodies:


3.5” cover for 5.25” bay, motherboard mounting stand offs, and extra cable guider

With the left side panel removed you get a good look at most the features of the CM 690, at the right side you see the tool less installation of the 5.25” devices, below those you see the plastic drive rails for 3.5” hard drives, the aluminum series of “knobs” running down the length of the 5.25” bay area are actually all the screws needed for securing the motherboard and other components.

The motherboard panel is none removable, but you can see there is plenty of room to work here, the cables from the I/O panel are visible here, they are held inside plastic cable guiders which can be screwed into none-used mounting holes in the motherboard panel.

At the left side in the photo you can see the 1x120mm exhaust fan and below that a series of blue plastic clips which hold the PCI brackets in place, as well as provide a tool less installation for expansion cards:



The right side panel holds less surprises, but it’s still worthy of a photo, you can see the 80mm fan mount at the right in the CPU area of the motherboard panel. At the left there is again a series of screws to be used for securing 5.25” devices in their bay. You have access here to the connector side of the hard drives you install, since you’ll be routing the SATA/IDE cables and power cables from this end to reduce cable clutter.



Something not visible in the photos above but interesting nonetheless are these two holes pre-cut for guiding water cooling tubing inside:



Cooling

As mentioned on the previous pages, the CM 690 is equipped to support a maximum of 8 fans of different sizes; the left side panel can hold two on its own:




The front panel has room for 1x120mm fan, Coolermaster installed a blue LED unit here, no sign of fan filter in front of this one, but the plastic grill and metal grill which sit in front do a good job of keeping out most larger dust particles and (cat)hair.



In the bottom you can install another fan, up to 140mm in size, in the photo below you can see a 120mm version, this one is optional and not installed by default:



The fan in the rear we mentioned before, room for 120mm there, one comes preinstalled. Then there is the top panel which can fit 2 fans up to 140mm in size; you can access this area by removing the top cover:



Finally there is the rear 80mm fan which can be installed right behind the CPU area on the motherboard panel; we did not have a 15mm low profile unit for testing, in the photo below a normal 25mm thick unit was installed:



With the thicker fan it was not possible to install the right side panel, so we removed it for testing.

The three preinstalled fans all come with 3-pin and 3to4-pin power connectors, giving you to choice on how to hook them up:



Onto the installation ->

Installation

Coolermaster equipped the CM 690 with plenty of features to make installation easy and painless. The only time you’ll need a screw driver is for power supply, motherboard or 5.25” device installation.

Let’s start with the 5.25” bays which are part plug and play, part old fashion, in order to get access to these bays you need to remove the front panel of the case, with a bit of “pull” effort it comes loose. The front panel is made from hard plastic, with metal grill inserts for the front fan filter and each individual 5.25” bay cover.



Each cover can be removed/installed easily by pushing the two clips which hold them in place outwards. The covers have a cloth inside to prevent dust from coming inside the case.



Coolermaster had to cut costs somewhere, here you can see the steel frame where you need to remove the metal cover for the bay you which too use.



You flip the plastic cover at the side upwards, slide in the optical drive, align it with the mounting holes, replace the cover and move the small slider to lock it into place. For a total secure fit you can put in screws at the other side.



The hard drive installation can be totally tool less, there are a total of 5 racks available to install HDD in:



Each rack features 4 soft rubber inserts with pin that match up with mounting holes on the HDD:



Optionally you can secure the drive with 2 screws (one at each side) but this is not really necessary if you don’t plan to move the case around a lot:



Once you slide the HDD back into the case you have access to the SATA/IDE and Power connection from the other side; while a 90° sata cable is certainly preferred, there was enough room left to use a normal one:



Motherboard installation was quick and easy, we had to remove on of the plastic cable guiders as we had a PATA connector at the side of the board;



Video, sound, network card are all installed in a blitz with this nifty clip system; we’ve seen similar ones before, but nothing as solid as these:



Even a dual slot 8800 GTX video card provided no challenge:



The power supply can be installed first or last, no preference, as there is enough room to navigate around inside. The PSU rests on small cushions to reduce vibration noise:



While we used a rather small 600W PSU we’ve read reports of people using longer power supplies which required them to remove the 140mm fan holder which sits at the bottom.

With everything installed, it’s time for stress testing ->

Test Setup and Test Methodology

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	XFX Geforce 8800 GTX Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD Maxtor 200gb SATA HDD

Room temperature was 20°C during testing, ambient noise clocked in at 37.8dBA. Noise measurements were taken at 50cm from the front of the case.

Realtime HDR and Orthos were used to stress the Dual Core system; Core 2 Temp was used to monitor Core temperature (duh) and Speedfan to check the temperature of HDD and Motherboard. Rivatuner’s temp monitor checked the G80 GPU at regular intervals. Maximum values were recorded.

The Intel Bax Axe motherboard features several thermal sensors, the “mobo” values are those recorded by the sensor which can be found between the DDR2 memory banks, marked A in the overview:



Cable routing & Fitting larger video cards

The CM 690 is fitted with some features to reduce cable clutter, the Antec PSU we are using is known for long cables and it has been a challenge in past reviews to find a place to hide all cables. In this case the preinstalled cable guiders do come in handy and succeed in removing cables from vital areas like CPU/VGA; the rear connection of the HDDs also helps of course as you will see in the photos below.

It’s unfortunate this Intel motherboard requires a 4-pin power connection right in the middle and that the Antec 8-pin EATX power cable is not long enough to have it follow another route; when using a different motherboard and PSU you will find the CM 690 to be a case to easily hide the cables in.



This case is large enough to accommodate the largest of VGA cards: 8800 GTX, without issue, there is room to spare!




Onto the stress testing ->

Test Results ~ with NVIDIA 8800 GTX

Pre-fitted with 3x120mm fans the CM 690 will have no trouble keeping your hardware inside cool enough; what we want to find out with our performance tests is if we can gain a cooling advantage by moving the fans around a bit, adding one here, removing another there, while keeping an eye on our dBA noise meter to find the better performance/noise configuration.

The three 120mm fans are model A12025-12CB-3BN-F1 rated at 1200rpm / 44 CFM, they can be under-volted easily and spin up nicely even at 5v.

In the chart below we used abbreviations for the location of where we installed the 120mm fans; most are straight forward, we just mention them here for reference. Front , Rear, Side, Top, Bottom. Only one test was with the Front fan undervolted at 5v, all other tests were with fans running at 12v (high speed).

These are the results obtained, compared the similar sized and priced models, no less than 8 other cases are included: Antec 900, Silverstone TJ-09, Coolermaster Stacker 830 Evo, Ultra Grid, Sunbeamtech 3D Storm, NZXT Adamas and Zirconium.



The 8800 GTX was running near maximum temperatures through out most of the configurations, causing higher noise levels. The classic configuration of 1x120mm front and 1x120mm in the back proved less ideal this time around, when adding one 120mm fan in the bottom pulling cool air inside the case the results were most favorable, installing one 120mm at the top instead of the bottom wasn’t too bad either, and if you add a second one at the top will surely prove itself useful.


CM 690 with 1x120mm installed in top panel, one in rear panel

The overall conclusion for the performance/noise is easy, if you run all fans at maximum speed you will notice this case humming along in a quiet room, if you undervolt these case fans they no longer become the main source of noise and you’ll have to look at the other components (VGA, CPU cooling) to reduce noise further. Temperature wise the results are encouraging, and there is much potential left, having only installed 3 out of 8 possible fans.

Speaking of which, we did an extra test with an 80mm fan in the back, we had to remove the back panel so the results are not comparable to those seen above. We also did not run RealTime HDR to stress the VGA, nor any other tool used before, instead we opted for Intel TAT short for Intel Thermal Analysis Tool, this software stresses the two cores on the Core 2 Duo to the maximum while recording the temperature of each core. Here are the results of our little test:

Reference no 80mm installed: Core1: 64°C / Core2: 60°C

80mm fan configured as out-take: Core1: 63°C / Core2: 63°C

80mm fan configured as in-take: Core1: 63°C / Core2: 63°C

Overall it’s hard to say it’s doing anything positive at all? We’re ignoring the fact that an 80mm fan will be louder and provide a very low performance/noise ratio.

Conclusive Thoughts

If this product carried a price-tag of $150/€150 our conclusion would have been quite straight forward, the CM 690 is a feature rich enclosure which comes with handy tool less features, three 120mm fans which keep all components cool, plus the possibility to add another 5 fans to provide for excellent thermal management, a lot of expandability options. Drawbacks are the steel construction which makes this case heavy to carry around, the side panels can be hard to install and remove. Overall a good case in a market with plenty of competition.

Now that we’ve learned that the case costs actually HALF of what we expected, at €76/$70 this case is the best there is at the price point, you’ll be hard pressed to find a mid tower ATX enclosure which packs as many features as the CM 690.

Newegg store (US): $70 - $20 (mail in rebate!)

ZipZoomFly store (US): $80 - $20 (mail in rebate!)

We have no hesitation when we say that the:

CM 690 Recommended for



We hope Coolermaster continues to surprise us with these affordable cases to please the budget minded enthusiasts out there; thank you for reading, until next time!