Cooler Master HAF 700 Review – Another Proper HAF!

Cooling Performance  

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).

NZXT H510 Flow
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.

It’s a HAF 700 EVO with a simplified front panel

Let’s face it, the HAF 700 and HAF 700 EVO are the same case, with one having a simplified front panel design and RGB fans and the other having non-RGB fans and a fancier front panel with integrated RGB lighting and an OLED screen. Both cases have the same internal layout and airflow pattern, allowing both cases to deliver the same thermal performance on our test suite. 

In our thermal tests, Cooler Master’s HAF 700 and HAF 700 EVO delivered thermals that were nigh-identical. The differences between the thermal profiles of both cases were within a margin or error for our test suite, which is why we have simply listed both cases under the same HAF 700 moniker in our graphs. 

600 RPM

Our 600 RPM fan tests are designed to separate the best cases from the airflow starved. If you case performs well at low fan speeds, it will run even better at higher fan speeds. If our components struggle to stay cool at low fan speeds, hotter hardware may struggle to stay cool at higher fan speeds. It’s that simple. If your case does well at 600 RPM, you will be able to build a quiet PC while maintaining solid thermals.

With the HAF 700 and HAF 700 EVO, Cooler Master has delivered some of the best thermals that we have seen using our test PC, with only Fractal’s Torrent managing to best Cooler Master’s newest HAF. This is a great showing from Cooler Master, especially after we consider that we are using this case in its stock configuration. We aren’t using all of this case’s top fan mounts or most of its bottom mounted fan mounting locations. This case can do better, whereas the Fractal Torrent is already kitted out with a complete allotment of cooling fans out of the box.

  

1,000 RPM

At 1000 RPM fan speeds, the HAF 700 EVO and HAF 700 are some of the best performing cases that we have tested, at stock it provided users with plenty of airflow and at 1000 RPM the case remains quiet. 1,000 RPM is the max speed of Cooler Master’s front-mounted 200mm intake fans.