Installation Impressions

Past experience has taught me that it's necessary to take your time, and often a clean build can take an hour, or more if water-cooling is involved. For example, I recently put together a system for a friend inside an Antec P180, and although this is a very nice case, the build seemed to take forever as it was very fiddly. The Cooler Master HAF 932 on the other hand made for a very quick and easy installation process that was over much sooner than anticipated.

The easily accessible hard drive bays sped the process up, as did the power supply bracket and the tool-less PCI device expansion slots. The motherboard slotted into place easy enough and with the memory and CPU/cooler already installed, half the job was already done. Next was the power supply which was locked into position in seconds. Being a modular power supply we only needed to connect the power cables that were going to be used.

In total four SATA hard drives were installed for RAID0, and again this was done quickly and effortlessly. The drives each screw into their own mounting bracket which then slides into the bay, locking into place. The SATA data and power cables are connected from the rear side of the case, meaning that the right side door must be removed for installation. It's unfortunate that this case doesn't include hot-swappable hard drive bays.

The four case fans could either be plugged into four pin power connectors using supplied adapters or directly to the motherboard's 3-pin fan headers. All these excess connectors and cables fit perfectly behind the motherboard tray. In fact I found tons of room behind the motherboard tray.

Installing the moderately large GeForce GTX 280 graphics card was done easily and the tool-less expansion slots supported the dual slot card without any issues. Length-wise there were loads of room to fit this high-end graphics card, with about 2.5" still left behind it. Fitting SLI cards in the HAF 932 is feasible and due to the layout of this case even 3-way SLI should be a possibility.