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This is my second look at a Coolermaster enclosure, the first being my review of the ATCS-710-GX1 case. The 710 was heralded as a budget case by Coolermaster standards, whilst this magnificent looking beast certainly was not. At time of release this was a £200+ effort; now you can pick one of these cases up for around £70-90 if you look around. That's certainly still quite expensive, so what sets this case apart from your bog-standard "Midi ATX Tower Case" from the local computer store. How funny you should ask, I was just about to take a look myself.

The ATCS-220C-PX1 is based around the same basic chassis design of many other Coolermaster cases - the 100 and 200 series all share the same basic internal design. This is definately not a bad thing as the internal design of these cases is superb. The 220 is a variation on the 210, which in turn is a variation on the 200. The 200 had no front door, the 210 had a plain acrlyic door, and the 220 has the acrylic door with illuminated ATCS logo. The logo is a feature not loved by all, we'll get to my personal taste later. In this review we'll take a look at the case from various angles, then onto the insides, and finally onto the ease of use and conclusions about the quality and "performance" of the case.

There it is. I think this case has an instant impact, and is one of those love (or hate) at first sight items. You may well have already made up your mind. Obviously the most prominent feature as we take a first look at the case is that acrylic door. This being the "PX1" the door is purple tinted, it's also available in "azure" blue and "verdant" green. Since I bought this case, I chose the purple on purpose... I like purple. The ATCS logo is very neatly etched into the back side of the door so that the front is perfectly smooth. Inside the right hand side metal "frame" is mounted a purple cold cathode (I assume) which illuminates the logo when the system is powered. Due to the etching, the logo glows very brightly and the rest of the door is gently illuminated, the edges picking up a nice glow.

The door is hinged on the right and unfortunately this cannot be [easily] changed. The light obviously needs to draw it's power somehow and does so via a pair of wires running through the hinge point at the top of the door. To swap the opening side you would need to drill new holes for these wires and for the "hinge" (really just a rod sitting in a cup) at top and bottom. It wouldn't be all that difficult but it would require some work.

Behind the door we have the clean attractive front panel. The panel follows the fairly uniform design across the Coolermaster range at the time which certainly isn't a bad thing. The main difference is the obvious omission of any fans - the door at the front limits the possibility of front cooling. This is a massive drawback for any case, and something door-fronted cases have at their disadvantage. What's more, Coolermaster have made no effort to substitute the missing ventilation. There are no fans on the bottom of the case, or in the side panels. This is going to have an adverse effect on cooling for sure. The power and reset buttons are neat, as are the power and activity LEDs. At the bottom of the panel are two USB ports - a useful addition and done quite attractively.

Moving on to the inside and I was stunned the first time I opened up this case. The insides are crafted from beatiful thick aluminium and in the daylight streaming in through my window it looks fantastic. Everything is made of thick (~2mm) aluminium in start contrast to my Lian Li case where the internals are all very thin aluminium sheet. The chassis looks and feels very rugged and sturdy which certainly means plus points for Coolermaster. We can see a fan here installed in the motherboard tray (more on that soon), and another stock fan is installed in a top mounted "blow hole". The fans are decent quality but two 80mm fans, both blowing air out of the case, does not mean for very efficient cooling. Once again it's a real shame Coolermaster couldn't come up with some way of sucking air into the case at the front (fans mounted at the lower front of the right hand side panel might have been a good substitute for front fans). Now, onto that motherboard tray.

Like the rest of the chassis, the motherboard tray is solidly built. It's when looking at these parts that the cost of these cases starts to make more sense. Real consideration to quality and longevity has been made - this case isn't going to fall apart any time soon. The tray slides reasonably smoothly out of the main chassis and provides very easy access for system building. This is good because when the tray is installed there is very little room around near the hard drive rack which extends the full height up to the cdrom bays. Manipulating cabling and such when the tray is installed isn't amazingly easy. There is unfortunately a slight problem with the tray in that one of the rivets on the rear side very slightly fouls the folded-over edge of the left hand side panel. It can be pushed past with a little pushing and pulling, but it slides in much more reassuringly smoothly if the side panel is removed. It's an annoyance, but not the end of the world.

Thanks to the tray installing the motherboard and associated components is childsplay. The picture shows my pentium 4 system installed and ready to slide into the case. I found it best to install the power supply, hard disks and drives with the motherboard tray removed then plug in all the various cables with the tray almost fully in. Once everything is plugged in, the tray can be slid in fully and screwed into place at the rear (with the included thumbscrews) and the job's a good 'un!

In the picture above, with everything installed, you should be able to make out the top mounted fan - a reasonably good position for a bit of extra ventilation. Note that the top fan uses a 4pin molex connection (with a passthrough, useful for plugging in the cathode inverter which is located just above the cdrom drives area) while the rear fan has a 3pin fan-header style plug. You can also see that I have installed four hard disks - not many people will be running more than four drives in their systems, and there is plenty of space for all four. More shouldn't pose a problem - there are two bays for 3.5" drives and the 5.25" bays can also be made use of. Hoewever, remember that the hard disks receive next to no active cooling thanks to the rather lacklustre ventilation. This is quite an important consideration to keep in mind.

Plenty of air forced out.. but where does it come from?

The cooling is quite a real problem in this case (hoho). With no intakes in the logical position (lower front) the only incoming air is sucked into the case through any available holes by the pressure created by the exhaust fans. This isn't a great system in any enclosure and is especially bad here where there are very few places for air to be dragged in. I notice that dust builds up along all the gaps between drive bay covers showing clearly that the exhaust fans are forcibly sucking air into the case via these tiny gaps. This definately isn't a good cooling system and could be making the system louder as well as warmer. Some side mounted fans would be a good modification to the case but it's a shame that user modifications are almost necessary for any high temperature systems. Cooler Master could have integrated some extra ventilation on the side panel, this would have meant for a much better cooling system.

The rather poor cooling is really the only major negative I can attribute to this case. One other little annoyance I found was the motherboard tray problem I mentioned a few paragraphs back. This picture shows what I'm on about:

As I said, removing the side panel removes the problem. But in a case of this calibre one doesn't expect any silly little screwups like this. It's akin to buying a ferrari and finding out you need to jiggle the door handle before you can open it (or something... loosest comparison ever). Oh, and one last thing. The usual Cooler Master piss-take - only three drive bay covers are included. Seriously, how much can one blanking plate cost to manufacture?

Well, I guess that pretty much brings us to the end. I hope I've covered everything. In the ATCS-220 we have a rather beautiful aluminium case that is generally very well built and easy to work with but with a couple of minor flaws and a fairly sub-par cooling potential. For most systems the case will cool adequately and serve you well. For rather more high performance systems stuffed with massively heat producing cpus and graphics cards, and more than 2 hard disks, the poor cooling may be a real issue.

Perhaps a slight example of form over function, but what fantastic form it is.

+ Great looks
+ Solid construction
+ Lightweight
+ Reasonable price (now)

- Poor cooling
- Tray fouls side panel
- Missing drive bay cover

Related:
Coolermaster UK.