Cooler Master ATCS 840 Aluminium ATX Case
Internal Layout
Sliding off the side panel the first thing you are greeted with are the two accessories boxes we opened up earlier in the review. These are accompanied by a large white sheet of card that covers the motherboard tray area offering useful information on where to place those motherboard spacers for mATX, ATX and E-ATX motherboards. Overall the internal area of the case looks fairly spacious and shares a similar layout to the popular Lian Li A70.
Cooler Master have clearly been listening to enthusiasts and have not only made additional holes in the motherboard tray to assist in the tidy routing of cables, but have also placed a large rectangular cut-out towards the top-left of the tray where the CPU would normally sit on a standard ATX (single CPU) motherboard. This enables users of the ATCS 840 to install/remove CPU coolers and waterblocks that require ‘hard mounting’ with bolts and backing plates, without first having to remove the motherboard. Kudos Cooler Master!
At the bottom of the case are two 120mm fan grills with the one to the left providing ventilation for PSU’s with downward-facing 120mm fans. In both instances the vents are protected with fan filters which is EXTREMELY important when drawing air up from dusty surfaces such as carpets. It’s also good to see that Cooler Master have made the fan filters easy to remove by simply pulling a handle and sliding the filter tray out.
Although not so easy to make out, the picture above-right shows the hard disk bay complete with a bracket for mounting a further two 120mm fans. While we’re sure that most people will be content with the huge 230mm fan keeping their hard disks cool, it’s good to see that Cooler Master are giving users the option to turn the ATCS 840 into a true wind tunnel!
For easy insertion and removal of hard disks, Cooler Master have fitted plastic trays to each of the six bays. These act much like the caddy’s found in server systems, but without the ability to ‘hot-swap’ drives due to the lack of an SATA backplane. While the cost of installing a backplane in the ATCS 840 would have been relatively high, this is something that Lian Li have done in their recent X2000 enclosure and in addition to giving users hot-swap functionality, it also allows drives to be installed/removed without needing to remove both side panels from the case.
Last, but most certainly not least is the removable motherboard tray. This allows a good portion of the system to be constructed outside of the case and then slid back into position for the final few cables to be connected at the end. A common problem with removable trays on most cases is that tall CPU coolers often hinder the reinsertion of the motherboard due to the width of the case. However, as the ATCS 840 is just that little bit wider than your average enclosure, even some of the tallest coolers should fit in without any clearance issues.
As we can see from the image above-right, Cooler Master have also opted to use bearings along the tray rails. This makes removal and insertion much more pleasant and reduces the chance of any vibrations/rattle between the tray and the rails when the system is powered on.
