Cooler Master HAF XM Full Tower Chassis Review

Overall the HAF XM is an impressive chassis, while it doesn’t present many ground breaking features it does integrate many tried and tested formulas to great effect that make it highly versatile. I especially liked the cable guard for the PSU and the bottom cable management cut-out, while this isn’t exactly a performance changing feature it still stands out as something new to me and I can see this chassis being popular with people who do a lot of benchmarking and overclocking, for several reasons.

Firstly the cable guard should protect your PSU connections and it also provides a huge cavity for “stuffing” any excess cables, that being said there is ample room to the rear of the chassis to cope with a large amount of cables anyway but it never hurts to have extra space. If you’re the sort of person who regularly swaps out hard drives then the pair of front accessible hot-swap bays will be very useful, as too will the hard drive trays on the interior of the chassis, or perhaps for what ever reason you change graphics cards a lot, in which case the guard on the PSU should prevent you from accidentally removing cables while uninstalling and reinstalling components.

Secondly the “car door style” handle on the side panel allows for lightening fast access to the chassis without fumbling around the back from screws, this just goes to reinforce that this chassis would be great for benchmarking, overclock and testing of components due to its durable cable protection, easy access and plentiful interior space.

There are a massive amount of cooling options too and Cooler Master live up to their cooling name by installing high quality fans, with a pair of 200mm and a single 140mm fan as standard there shouldn’t be any concerns regarding airflow here, add to that the support for multiple fan sizes and configurations, additional fans in the top and side panels, plenty of room for radiators and their related cables / pipes and you’ve got a solid basis for any high performance system without too much concern about component compatibility.

While some may not approve of the styling of this chassis, it is rather bold and imposing in some senses but I rather like it and it lends itself to its almost industrial approach to performance, cooling and compatibility with high end components, large coolers and multi-GPU setups. It’s this extensive compatibility for high end components and high build quality that really sell me on the HAF XM which is why I am happy to award it with our eTeknix Editor’s Choice Award, it’s hard to find a chassis this robust and capable for under £100 anywhere else.