Coolermaster N400 Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Total build time on the N400 was around 40 minutes, which is one of the slower builds I have done in a long time, yet it could have been much quicker had I known a few things in advance or not attempted to push the limits of the chassis as I did. The first issue I had was that I couldn’t mount the Corsair H100i, not even on the right side panel mount which is said to support a radiator, least I couldn’t fit it with fans mounted. I got the H80i in nicely though, I had to rotate the block 90 degrees but that’s hardly a big issue.

The next issue was cable management, which does look good, but it really isn’t. I normally use extension cables and while I do have the 24 pin cable extension on, I do not have the black cables for the GPU. This isn’t essential, I just think it looks good in our build pictures but the configuration I have here really is taxing the space behind the motherboard, there is no room. Worse is that I’m having to route cables through the fan mounts on the right side, this does work well but it now means I can’t use the fan mounts for fans.

With so many hard drive bays available it is easy to fill this system with storage, but it will get cramped in here pretty quick with the minimal cable routing and it’s more than likely that you will have all cables in front of the motherboard, as with lots of storage in place you’ll likely want to take advantage of the right side fans to keep the drives cool.

Although I had a few issues, the build does still look good, but it’s clear this wasn’t designed for a modern gaming rig. That being said our GPU and CPU coolers have plenty of room to breath and you could still get a pretty high performance system in here with a little forward planning to take advantage of what could be a decent air cooled setup.

With the side panel back on everything looks nice and clean again, you can just about see the MSI logo through the side fan vent but other than that it looks just like it did when we took it out of the box.