This XXL mega-case for overclockers will take ALL your cooling
Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
A gigantic mega-case for the most extreme builds, Cooler Master's HAF 700 beats its closest rival in sheer quantity of fan and radiator support, while also being less expensive. That said, it's big enough to be a non-starter for all but the most motivated and cooling-stocked.
Trust the first pictures you see—assuming they lack a smaller case, or a small child, for scale—and the HAF 700 looks like just another flashy PC case. Then you see it in person. Your first clue is that those aren’t 120mm or 140mm fans on the front, but twin saucer-size 200mm. In the $299.99 HAF 700, we’re looking at a case that’s roughly a third larger in every direction compared to an ordinary mid-tower. (No wonder Cooler Master subtitles it "The Berserker"!) This chassis is all about maximum radiator and storage support, in a day when the SSD has been reduced to M.2 gumstick format and few folks run more than one video card. If you're looking for a maximum-capacity beast, though, and height and footprint aren't issues, it's a reasonably priced and very capable monster.
Don't have the scale down yet? Take, for example, the front-panel port lineup, which is a secondary clue to the XXL size. The HAF 700 has four USB Type-A ports and a USB Type-C; these technically qualify as USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 3.2 Gen 2. And yet, a whopping five front USB ports is the least berserk thing about this high-end case. Reset and power buttons, plus microphone and headphone jacks, are found on the other side of the upper 200mm intake fan.
Turning the HAF 700 around gives us more perspective: The reason that it doesn’t appear extraordinarily deep in the front/left oblique photo is that its motherboard tray is spaced a few inches from the left panel. Below, we can already see the power-supply mount behind the motherboard tray, and as small as that opening looks, it actually has the traditional PS2-pattern used by full-size ATX power units.
Large enough for a 13-inch-deep E-ATX or SSI-EEB motherboard, the HAF 700 has enough space under its bottom edge to hold one of those old XL-ATX behemoth motherboards (from back in the four-way SLI days), along with an eighth PCI Express slot position just in case you’d like to try, for whatever obscure reason, mounting a double-slot card at the bottom of a standard ATX/EATX mobo. The two 200mm intake fans stand prominently on a front panel that appears to be drilled for a few other (unspecified) odd sizes, and the two 120mm exhaust fans are screwed to slots that allow them to be lowered to clear—get this—a 240mm-class (twin 120mm) liquid cooling radiator.
The bottom features a triple 120mm or 140mm fan mount over a slide-out dust filter and enough room to fit so-called 360mm and 420mm radiators of any practical length. The single included 120mm fan down here is the only one in the system that isn’t already connected, and that’s probably because Cooler Master feels that many owners will be tossing this one to instead install their own matching set.
The lower radiator mount is removable via a single latch. Surprisingly, it is designed to tilt approximately 15 degrees toward the glass side, if desired. Since we can’t think of any reason to tilt the intake fans away from the intake filter, we’ll consider this one of the HAF 700’s quirkiest features.
Even more unusual is that the top panel features space for two (yes, two) 360mm-class radiators via six 120mm fans. With 500mm of length available, it’s the width that limits users of 140mm fans to a single 420mm-class radiator. The two rows of 120mm fans are also too far apart to mount double-row (such as 240mm by 240mm square) radiators.
Because the motherboard tray is set inward but the top panel radiator mounts aren’t, we find a 106mm nook above the motherboard tray. That’s enough room for an Alphacool NexXxoS Monstra(Opens in a new window) 360mm by 80mm radiator, plus 25mm fans on the more restrictive right side! Given that we like to leave more than 1mm of space for airflow (among other things), a pair of 60mm-thick triple-fan radiators and two rows of 38mm-thick 120mm fans sounds far more reasonable a maximum. Oh, and for those who like fan sandwiches, 25mm plus 45mm plus 25mm is still 11mm less than 106mm.
Then there's the PCI Express card mounting. Card latches were a big deal two decades ago, with dozens of terrible designs polluting the market among the few actually passing muster. The HAF 700 brings them back in the best way possible. Its fully functional card-securing device opens easily from the outside and closes securely over locator studs. The locator studs keep cards from slipping out of position, and can be replaced with screws when screws are required. We did have some quibbles, though, among them the fact that the slot barely opened wide enough to allow our card’s lower bracket tabs to slide past our motherboard’s cosmetic plastic covering, and that replacing its studs with screws would require screwdrivers with long, thin shanks.
Removing the right side reveals intake dust filters for the power supply and optional side-mounted radiator/fans. Attached with a strip of magnets around the periphery, there’s unfortunately nothing to locate these filter sheets within the flat plane that is the steel right-side panel. Users must align these visually, and remove the side panel to re-align whenever mishandling causes these to shift.
Showing what’s behind the right side panel requires the removal of yet another, smaller panel. The gray thing at the top of that smaller panel is a quarter-turn latch.
That inner panel is drilled to support two drives in the user’s choice of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors.
You see, in the image below, behind the outer two-drive trays are three single-drive trays (left) and a four-drive cage (right) that tilts out for easy removal. Behind the three single drive trays is a fan mount with slots that fit up to four 120mm or three 140mm fans, plus radiators that match either of those options. An ARGB controller and a fan hub are seen before the drive cage, while the power supply bay is seen below it.
The ARGB controller has two inputs and three outputs: The lower-left micro USB connector goes to an internal USB 2.0 header cable, the 5V power-supply connector goes to a SATA-style power lead, and the “ARGB1” header goes to a fan hub above it. We zoomed in with hopes that someone reading this would identify the controller.
Powered separately by a second SATA-style lead cable, the fan hub includes seven PWM and five ARGB headers. Including the two open headers on the ARGB controller, the HAF 700 provides power and control for seven ARGB fans.
Even though the HAF 700 supports full-size power supplies more than 200mm deep, it'll take much smaller, more mortal models. (FSP supplied us with a unit that fits every type of case we test and still has enough power to support any kind of hardware we’d throw on it; long cables and a PS2 adapter plate are key to its installation flexibility.) Meanwhile, Corsair’s iCUE H100i RGB Pro XT keeps our systems lit…no matter how flashy the case. That's our standard test cooler, though of course it's undersize for this class of chassis; you buy a case like this to mount big radiators. Here is a summary of our test config...
The first thing we need to do is screw in the motherboard and CPU cooler: The HAF 700’s installation kit is a whole hardware store, coming in a plastic organizer tray. It includes three additional standoffs to support 13-inch-deep motherboards, 12 fan screws, two sets of 20 threaded pins for push-mounting 2.5-inch drives and 3.5-inch drives, 23 hex/Phillips #2 combo head screws in #6-32 thread, 16 M3 screws for mounting 2.5-inch drives to trays that don’t support push-in installation, four longer #6-32 screws for other drive-mounting needs, a cleaning cloth, three Velcro-brand (according to Cooler Master) cable straps, and 10 cable ties.
Next come the cables: Cooler Master provisioned the HAF 700 with an ingenious clip that keeps its power button and LED leads grouped together in the now-standard Intel format, and can be slid off for the leads to fit other boards. Also seen here is the USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable (labeled USB 3.1, because it’s both), two USB 3.2 Gen 1 cables that are helpfully labeled with both proper and familiar standards, a USB 2.0 cable for the ARGB controller, and the usual HD Audio for front-panel connections. Not shown are the two SATA-type drive power leads that separately power the ARGB controller and the fan hub.
After connecting those cables to the mainboard, we’re ready to add our power supply cables. This is how the HAF 700’s interior looks when equipped only with regular ATX-size parts. Its giant 480mm-class side radiator mount is clearly visible several inches forward of the motherboard.
And here’s how it looks all lit up. This is a giant case, not tiny components, mind you: This chassis dwarfs just about anything you might put in it from a "normal"-size mid-tower.
The HAF 700’s baseline CPU cooling performance finishes on par with the top three cases in our comparison for close to a four-way tie. Of course, all these cases are designed to support a far larger cooling system than what’s included in our baseline testing configuration.
Our system is configured to use the radiator fans for voltage-regulator cooling, but the HAF 700 is designed to hold something of a bit grander scale. That’s likely the greatest reason that it fell to fourth place in our voltage-regulator measurements.
Then we looked at GPU cooling. HAF 700 is tied for first with the NZXT H7 Flow when it comes to providing cooling air to our GPU.
With nothing more than a set of front-panel fan blades to keep the noise of our graphics card inside the HAF 700, the fact that its large size puts that noise source at a greater distance from our meter is the only explanation for its mid-pack sound-pressure level. Measuring from the glass side gave us lower numbers than from the steel side.
Cooler Master’s HAF 700 is big, but is it a significant addition to the PC-case field? With space for a quad-fan radiator plus three triple-fan ones, it’s certainly going to garner great interest from some members of the overclocking community. Still, much of its hardware lacks the polish of the case we’d consider its closest recent competitor, the Corsair iCUE 5000T RGB, though it does have a super-slick card-latching mechanism.
But case appearances are nothing if not subjective, and plenty of folks will prefer the classic mecha-look of the HAF 700. Moreover, the HAF 700 is 25% cheaper than the 5000T, and wide enough to support an extra radiator on top…and on the bottom…and even the back. It's a chassis for the cooling 1%, and we think that makes it a bit, well—berserker? more berserk?—than its competition. We're glad it exists, but we're still working on justifying that second radiator in our PC, never mind a third or fourth.
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Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
By that time, I’d already self-published some guidelines on hardcore PC stuff: pin-modifying processors to defeat compatibility checks and overclock non-overclockable systems. I saw a chance to get paid for my knowledge, and have since written more than a thousand pieces (many of them for the seminal tech site Tom's Hardware) before finding my latest opportunity: with PCMag.
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