Cooler Master Scout

Results Analysis

Cooling performance for the Scout is very much a tale of two sides. On the one hand you have the CPU cooling performance which, as it has been with similarly designed cases, was excellent. The action of the twin 120mm exhausts around the CPU cooler helped to produce some extremely low CPU temperatures. Under full load our 130W Pentium 4 was kept at a cool 21°C above ambient; a result that’s comfortably towards the top of our performance graphs.

GPU cooling (out the box) however, was pretty poor. While at idle our passively cooled Radeon HD 3850 sat at 21°C above room temperature, a result shared by a number of other low noise cases, at full load in 3DMark 2006 the GPU peaked at a whopping 54°C above ambient room temperature, one of the hottest results we’ve encountered since standardising our case testing hardware last year.

While we appreciate that we use a passively cooled, rather than conventional active cooled graphics card, this result is still indicative of poor airflow to the GPU is inside the case. Unlike in competing chassis, such as the Antec Nine Hundred Two which boasts twin front 120mm intakes, there’s just the one front intake fan bundled with the Scout, which is a long way away from the GPU, limiting airflow to what is likely the most thermally demanding component in your case.


Disappointed with the GPU cooling, especially as similarly designed cases have offered so much better results, we decided to see the difference fitting a 120mm into one of the Scout’s side panel 120mm fan mounts would make: after all, 120mm fans are pretty cheap and easy to come by. While Cooler Master has chosen to not include such a fan with the case (a mistake in our eyes), the difference made by adding a single 120mm Noctua NF-P12 to the side was enormous, with a drop in GPU temperature at idle of 8°C and just 23°C under load!

However, while the thermal results were polarized between CPU and GPU cooling, one enormously impressive factor in the Scout’s performance was its noise levels, or more accurately, a remarkable lack of them. The three 120mm fans Cooler Master has fitted are all startlingly quiet, and while not silent, were a big improvement over other competing "gamer" cases.

In fact, with the Noctua NF-P12 fitted into the side panel, it was easily the noisiest fan in the case! So serious kudos is in order to Cooler Master for making a gamer targeted chassis that doesn’t deafen us with the noise of a thousand hurricanes. It’s just a shame the GPU cooling isn’t better out of the box, an issue which could have been solved by the simple inclusion of another 120mm cooling fan.