Coolermaster N400 Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Overall I need to say I don’t like the N400, I’m a little disappointed overall and was expecting this to be a larger edition of the truely fantastic N200 that we recently reviewed, since that was one of the best chassis I’ve ever worked with and I’ve found this to be one of the worst… oh dear, sounds bad doesn’t it? It’s not really that bad a chassis overall, but it’s certainly not intended for an end user like myself.

The N400 does hold a setup like ours today quite well, cable management looks ok, cooling should be good and we even got a water cooler in there, but much of the chassis features are wasted and that seems a shame. However, had I wanted to build something with huge ammounts of storage, then the N400 would have been fantastic as it’s packed with HDD bays, as well as 3 2.5″ bays, albeit two of them take up a fan mount on the right side, if I was cramming this thing full of HDD’s I’d really want to take advantage of those fan mounts.

When you start getting into massive storage your looking at rendering rigs, networking system and other such solutions, in which case noise is hardly going to be your primary concern, the idea would be to pack this chassis with drives and graphics cards, fill it will fans that will brute force air through it and at that point a lack of cable management wouldn’t make a difference as 10 hard drives would fill on half of the case with extra cables anyway. At this point the N400 would become a great chassis, suddenly you’ve got massive ammounts of storage and cooling in a chassis that only cost you £50 and there arent many other solutions around that can say the same.

I don’t like this case, it’s that simple, but it is well built, the styling is understated and professional looking so that it wouldn’t look too over the top in a commercial or office enviroment, it comes with a trusted brand name behind it (Coolermaster obviously) and its cost effective too. So where I might not like the case on a personal level, you might love it on a professional level.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Extensive air cooling options
• Compact size
• Looks tidy on exterior
• Holds plenty of storage

Cons

• Cable routing is limited to non exsistant
• Dust filters are in odd places

eTeknix says: “This chassis is capable of great things for very little money, while also offering some impressive cooling for those looking for a cost effective networking or rending rig.”