|
Columns | Projects | Reviews |
|
George Ross, October 23, 2009
When building a PC one of the biggest decisions you have to make is your choice of housing or lack thereof for all of your components. When building a gaming PC you look for something with good looks and good airflow. Let's see what the Elite 335 from Cooler Master brings to the table for around $65 or $50 sans the shipping.
The Elite 335 comes in your basic ordinary everyday case box with some molded Styrofoam to help it make it through the shipping process.
This case comes with only the barest of essentials a few standoffs for the motherboard, screws, a round magnet, a sticky back, a ty wrap and the installation guide.
This case has plenty of room for most gaming setups even allowing for multi-GPU setups if that is the kind of thing you are into. Although I had to remove the plastic CPU fan duct that was attached to the side panel in order to use a CNPS9700 to cool the processor in the test setup.
The Elite 335 does shine in the tool-less mechanism department. I really liked how Cooler Master designed the drive cage holders. The PCI slot holder also worked well. What's more is that you can use regular screws if you don't like how the tool-less mechanisms work or don't trust them, but I don't see a need to not use them.
The only thing I didn't like about the Elite 335 is the top mounting power supply, but that is a personal preference. To help things keep cool and quite I added a PWM controlled AF12025 120mm fan from Arctic Cooling in front of the drive cage and hooked up the supplied 120mm Cooler Master case fan that come with the case with it to have a quieter computing experience. Extra ventilation PCI brackets were also installed in the unused PCI slots in order to get more air moving around the video card.
| Processor | AMD Athlon 6400+ Black Edition @ 3.2GHz |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE GA-MA770-DS3 |
| Memory | GeIL 4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) @ 400 MHz (DDR 800) 5-5-5-15 Dual Channel Mode |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Green Edition 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s |
| Video Card | ATI Radeon HD 4870 @ 800MHz core 950MHz (3800Gb/s) memory Catalyst 9.9 |
| Optical Disk Drive | Pioneer DVR-115DBK |
| Power Supply | FSP Blue Storm II 500W |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate x86 SP1 |
