A Closer Look (Inside)
While the outside of the case is for looks, the inside is where all the magic happens. Where sharp edges and hard to reach areas can make your system build a multi-day nightmare. Luckily (or by good design) the Cosmos 1000 has none of that.
Opening up drive bay door reveals the expansion ports that will house your 3.5″ drives and your 5.25″ drives. They made of a mesh aluminum that is both functional to allow air to flow through but also just looks nice too and sets a good contrast to the brushed aluminum sides and top.
You get four removable 5.25″ access sections though the top most one already has the metal plate removed as they assume you’ll have at least a single optical drive. If you want to use more you’ll need to get some needle nose pliers to remove the other plates more easily.
Inside the 5.25″ drive bays you won’t find your typical slots for screwing into the holes on your drives. Instead, Cooler Master has developed a unique and simple push-pin based installation method. You simply line the drive up with these pin holes (shown above in a somewhat blurry manner) and then push the big blue button to lock the drive in place.
This doesn’t leave much if any room for minor tweaks or adjustments but the installation of my optical drive seemed fine. You can tell the drive bezel and the case bezel don’t completely line up, but I can live with it.
Both removable doors on the Cosmos 1000 are padded with fairly dense foam that is used for noise dampening. There is also a thin stripe of rubber gasket along the door seam that is used for creating an air tight seal and also helps remove any kind of rattles that metal on metal door might cause.
Here you can see how think the case’s door and foam are — these are cheap and flimsy like many other aluminum cases we have used before.
Removing the access side door shows us the inside of the Cosmos 1000 for the first time. There are numerous interesting design points here including the duct work in the middle. Also notice the paper guide on the back plane there for easily finding out which holes you’ll need to use when installing your motherboard stand-offs.
Taking the duct off for installation is required and the interior of it is just hollow. The placement of the duct is made to help with ventilation of the graphics cards.
This towering part of the Cosmos will hold all of your optical and hard drives and any other accessories you might be adding in here. We already discussed the optical drive bays, but the hard drive bays along the bottom will need some attention all their own.
These two angled shots show the depth of the drive bays for the optical drives as well as the bottom fan for air intake.
