Legit Reviews

Cooler Master HAF 922 Mid Tower Case Review

Today we are looking at the newest addition to the Cooler Master line up, the HAF 922. The HAF 922 is the mid tower sibling of the HAF 932 full tower. The HAF 932 has done Cooler Master well and they hope the HAF 922 will do the same. So, join us as we look over this newest High Air Flow chassis offering from Cooler Master.

Following the success of the full tower HAF 932, Cooler Master has now successfully extended their product line to a mid tower with the HAF 922. It has a strong appearance and I think they did a good job on the HAF 922. The open design of the HAF line makes for nice air flow throughout the case. The space also made it easy to work in the case; I have rather large hands and I had no issues working in the HAF 922 at all.

Article Title: Cooler Master HAF 922 Mid Tower Case Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/970/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: MSRP of $129.99

I got my hands on the HAF 922 today and was building a system in it and ran into a few problems that Shane didn't bring up in the review as I am building a 2P workstation setup with an adaptec hardware SATA Raid card on four Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drives.
I put all the drives in the sideway mounted hard drive cages and once you put on the SATA RAID cables and then plug in the SATA power headers the side door won't fit on. This is a problem with any hard drive and RAID card, so if you want to run hardware RAID the HAF 922 isn't the case for you.
The cooler master HAF 922 fits full size power supplies, but it is a tight fight as you can see from the PC Power & Cooling 1KW Power Supply installed into the HAF 922 in the image above. The front of the PSU can't be bolted down, but that is only really needed when top mounting this heavy power supply.
The last thing I noticed is that the rubber feet came off not once, but four times when building the system on carpet... I've never had one case lose its rubber pads the first day in over a decade of building computers, so this was interesting. They need some better adhesive on those pads if you ask me as they easily peel off if you try.

All together building a system in the HAF 922 isn't bad, but for enthusiasts that want to run RAID cards it's not a great case.

hmmmm, I slid the case around on the desk alot... guess I need to add carpet to the list

That is one big f'n PSU

For the RAID, why the funky adapter for the power?

With the economy the way it is, some enthusiasts will start to cut corners on builds and the case is the first place

That's the reason I went with the Antec Three Hundred. I knew I should've picked up a Cooler Master case but I didn't want to spent what they wanted for one.

bubba wrote:hmmmm, I slid the case around on the desk alot... guess I need to add carpet to the list

That is one big f'n PSU

For the RAID, why the funky adapter for the power?

Because on many of the raid cards you have to use them ;)

Major_A wrote:

With the economy the way it is, some enthusiasts will start to cut corners on builds and the case is the first place

That's the reason I went with the Antec Three Hundred. I knew I should've picked up a Cooler Master case but I didn't want to spent what they wanted for one.

I almost bought a 300 as well for my server but decided to keep the case I have for it (a big cube case). I love my 900. Is there that much construction quality diffrence between the two?

The Three Hundred feels (metal wise) as sturdy as any of the Linkworld cases on Newegg (I know I have a Linkworld case ). I wanted it because it holds 6 HHDs (only 4 if you have a long card like my GTX 260) and has a ton of 120MM fans. My old full tower (Chieftech Dragon knockoff) only had places for 80MM fans. Putting everything in the Three Hundred was a lot harder to do with less room (full tower vs mid tower). Overall for $50 shipped it seems fine for now. Right now running 6 120MM fans and 1 140MM fan, so the cooling is definitely upgraded over my old case.

Major_A wrote:The Three Hundred feels (metal wise) as sturdy as any of the Linkworld cases on Newegg (I know I have a Linkworld case ). I wanted it because it holds 6 HHDs (only 4 if you have a long card like my GTX 260) and has a ton of 120MM fans. My old full tower (Chieftech Dragon knockoff) only had places for 80MM fans. Putting everything in the Three Hundred was a lot harder to do with less room (full tower vs mid tower). Overall for $50 shipped it seems fine for now. Right now running 6 120MM fans and 1 140MM fan, so the cooling is definitely upgraded over my old case.

Yeah, my server's running 4 80mm fans and it's probably 3 times as loud as Warmachine and that things got 5 120mm Yate Loon high speeds in it. When I get done remodeling my office I plan to get a new case for the server. But then again, I plan to do a lot of things to that machine like put in RAID but never seem to get around to it. Guess I'll just cry when I loose all 3TB of data because I was to cheap to back it all up.