Cooler Master Cosmos II 25th Anniversary Edition Review

Interior

The interior will be very familiar to any Cosmos II owner, as things are pretty much identical, both in terms of layout and features. That said, Cooler Master has taken the opportunity to re-enter the world of aluminium, with the high quality metal now used for both the motherboard tray and the mid-plate in a move done apparently to pay homage to the aluminium-heavy ATCS series of cases from Cooler Master's enviable back-catalogue.

You get 11 storage drive bays that cater for either a 2.5" or 3.5" drives plus a further two 3.5" external hot swap bays located beneath the 5.25" bays with SATA power and data leads already hooked up and ready to connect to your motherboard. The interior is quite stark, though, especially compared to the Cosmos II's moody anodised black, but this is likely to come down to personal taste. The engraved motherboard tray has ample routing holes, all sealed with rubber grommets, and as we're dealing with a 70cm tall case here, Cooler Master has sensibly included an extension lead for the 8-pin EPS12V connector, although even our modest Fractal Design PSU was able to reach with room to spare, so you may not need it.


Something we did notice compared to the standard Cosmos II is that the latter has slots cut into the side panel to allow the side fans to breath. However, here, the side panel is solid tempered glass, so the fans will be doing little more than pushing air around, especially as they're mostly sealed in the bottom of the case on a swing-out arm. This can be replaced with a bracket to mount a 240mm radiator, although again, the cooling arrangement down here with few vents isn't ideal. Thankfully, the roof plays host to several other fan mounts with space here for a half-height 240mm or 280m radiator and single row of fans.


The hard drive cages offer some useful places to hide cables, but the Cosmos II 25th Anniversary Edition does feel a little dated here with just your standard pack of cable ties and little else to offer competition to the likes of Phanteks and NZXT that often have useful and innovative ways of making the build process a little easier. The Cosmos II 25th Anniversary Edition isn't particularly modding-friendly either, with many of the internal fixtures and fittings being riveted in place. This hasn't stopped numerous modders from stripping everything out to kit the case out with extensive water-cooling systems, but there's definitely more that could be done here.


Many of the drive bays can be removed, though, which does clear a lot of space, plus the drive cages are dotted around, so removing everything in the base will still leave you with a few places to mount hard disks and SSDs. With tinted side panels, there's little need to offer anything lavish such as dedicated SSD mounts to show off your fast, shiny storage - the Cosmos II 25th Anniversary Edition is more about understatement than raging aesthetics, even if it is monstrous in size.