Cooler Master HAF 912: First Look

Cooler Master HAF 912: First Look

Manufacturer: Cooler Master

We dropped by Cooler Master late last month to see the upcoming new addition to its HAF family. After launching the largest HAF-X (internally known as the 942, bigger brother to the 932) last month, by an obvious deduction the 912 is therefore the baby of the bunch.


But the fact is you'd probably be hard pushed to notice the size difference between a 922 and 912 - mostly it's in length, rather than height. The 922 supports CPU coolers up to 190mm tall while the 912 is a bit more restrictive, at 175mm. The biggest difference is that there's 270mm (a little over 11.5in) of space for the graphics card, but remove the HDD cage for four 3.5in drives and there's an unrestricted 390mm - more than any case in the HAF range. This sacrifices most of the HDD capacity though, although budget cases are never without a trade off. No doubt this will still tempt some people who prefer to let a NAS take the storage strain and focus on solely SSDs in their main PC (Harry and James lead this example).


The HAF 912 won't actually be a single product though - there will be a variety of three for different markets: The US will get the vanilla model, which costs an impressively low $59 MSRP but lacks the painted black insides, eSATA on the front and transparent side panel. In the EU we get the 'Plus' model at an also acceptable $79, which has all the black bits but no window again, and Asia gets the 'Advanced' model at $99 with window and all black inside and out.


While the 912 has an obvious price advantage versus the $129 (MSRP) HAF 922 that works in its favour, it also features more modern upgrades - some of which are a bit surprising...