Airflow Beast! Cooler Master HAF II 500 PC Case Review
Thermal Performance
Cooler Master HAF II 500 Thermal Testing
Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look great from the outside, but it’s for nothing if your PC has an internal temperature like an oven. Your PC case needs sufficient airflow to keep your components cool under load and prevent thermal throttling. For our testing, we used the following hardware. We test at fixed fan speeds, so only the case and its fans affect thermal performance.
Intel i9-9700K @4.8GHz at 1.2V
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming @ 100% Current Capacity/ LL lvl16
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition @ 9V via Fan Speed Reducer
Nvidia GTX 980 Reference @ 60% Fixed Fan Speed
Corsair LP Vengeance LP (Grey) @ 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD
Corsair RM550X Power Supply
The graph below showcases Delta temperatures with a controlled ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.
Fan Speed Tests
Cooler Master’s HAF II 500 is an unusual PC case. All of its fans are HUGE. Typically, we group the results of our thermal testing based on fan speed. The fans in this case max out at 1100 RPM, which doesn’t fit well within our standard 1,000 RPM, 1,500 RPM, and Maximum RPM graphs. Furthermore, these fans aren’t quiet at 1,100 RPM. Remember, 220mm fans are more than 80% wider than 120mm fans. The top speed of a 220mm fan running at 1,100 RPM is similar to a 120mm fan running at 2,000 RPM.
For this review, we have placed 600 RPM, 8,00 RPM and 1,100 RPM results in all of our charts. In all of our charts, Cooler Master’s HAF II 500 stands amongst the best PC cases available. Even with its fans running at 600 RPM, it stands above most of the PC cases we have tested with maxed-out fan RPMs.
Cooler Master’s HAF II 500 excels when it comes to GPU cooling and delivers great CPU cooling results. If you want airflow, this is one of the best PC cases available.
Maximum Fan Speeds
At 600 RPM, this case outperforms most other PC cases with their fans maxed out. Cooler Master clearly wanted to live up to its HAF (High Air Flow) branding.
