Cooler Master MasterBox 540 Review

Cooling Performance – The Cooler Master SuffoCASE  

Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look fantastic and seem silent from the outside, but all of that is for nought if your PC has the internal temperature of an oven. Your PC case needs enough airflow for your components to remain cool under load and to prevent any form of thermal throttling. For our test, we used the following hardware using fixed fan speeds (so that only the case and its included fans can influence thermal performance).

 

Cooler Master MasterBox 540
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 Vengiance 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. 

Results – 1000 RPM

There is no getting around this, the MasterBox 540 runs hot. It is one of the hottest cases that we have tested with our current hardware setup. Even after adding two more fans, the case runs hot. This is not a good sign, especially for a case that costs £109.99. 

Let’s be clear here, this is one of the worst cases that we have EVER tested, at least from a thermal standpoint. 

Need Cooler Temps – Take Off the Front Panel…

It was easy to see the problem with the MasterBox 540. It was the case’s front panel. Removing this panel quickly cooled this case down to normal levels, highlighting that one of the key aesthetic features of this enclosure is a performance killer. Adding two fans barely reduced GPU temperatures, and removing the front cooled our GPU by 9 degrees… 

In our test system, 80-degree GPU temperatures cause our graphics card to throttle. When this happens, our system is considered to have failed our thermal tests. With our thermally controlled test environment, an 80-degree GPU temperature in a room temperature of 20-degrees is a delta temperature of 60. If our GPU hits 60-degrees in our testing, a case has failed our thermal tests. 

  
  
Results – Max RPM Fans

Even with the enclosure’s fans running at their highest speeds, it does little to help with the Masterbox 540’s airflow problem. When we added front fans, the case has an audible suction sound, highlighting how restricted the case’s airflow is. Cooler Master can do better than this. For a case this expensive, this is hugely disappointing.