HAF 922 Internal Design
Like the original HAF chassis, the new HAF 922 looks rather simple on the inside. There are no annoying dividers or strange thermal modules. Cooler Master has stuck to the basics by not trying to include those "special" features that you never end up using.
The HAF 922 provides plenty of room for cable management, a means for installing any CPU cooler without having to remove the motherboard, as well as quick access to the drive bays.
Using the patented finger-press buttons, the 5.25" drive bays offer an ultra quick and reliable way to install and remove devices. Unlike many other tool-less designs that are clumsy and impractical, the finger-press buttons work very well. The removable hard drive racks also work nicely and make installing devices a breeze.
There is a large square hole in the motherboard tray located behind where the CPU would be positioned on a typical motherboard. This hole is designed to give users access to the rear of the CPU socket, allowing for the installation or removal of heatsinks that require the entire motherboard to be removed first. This is a simple yet amazingly useful design feature that Cooler Master first introduced with their ATCS 840 case.
The HAF 922 provides users with quite a few cable management options, and as we found with the original HAF there is quite a lot of room to stick cables behind the motherboard tray. While the cable management is good for the most part, we were disappointed to find that the motherboard tray itself does not reach the 5.25" and 3.5" drive bays as it did in the original.
The HAF 922 offers a seriously large number of expansion slots for a mid tower. In total the case can support five 3.5" drives, five 5.25" devices, and seven expansion slots. If anything, we would have liked to have one more 3.5" drive bay as most motherboards support a minimum of six SATA devices, but that's probably just nitpicking.
As mentioned before, HAF stands for "High Air Flow" and Cooler Master didn't mean anything less than that by including two 200mm fans and a single 120mm fan. If you were to remove the two 200mm fans and install smaller 120mm units, this case could easily house 7 fans in total.
The front mounted 200mm fan features red LEDs and operates at 700 RPM while generating just 19 dBA of noise. The top mounted fan also operates at that same RPM (no LEDs). Finally, the rear smaller fan works at 1200 RPM generating 17dBA of noise. All up the HAF 922 is a reasonably quiet case that moves a ton of air.