Cooler Master MasterBox NR400 Micro-ATX Tower with Front Mesh Ventilation, Minimal Design, Tempered Glass Side Panel and Single Headset Jack

Great MicroATX case at a great price, I've had it a year and still very happy with it. This is an ideal case if you want great airflow in a compact case at a reasonable price.- Good quality, everything fits together well, tight tolerances, no weird gaps, didn't notice any sharp edges.- Attractive, minimalist design. Looks at home as a gamer PC or office PC.- Pretty compact for a MicroATX (many others I looked at were wider, taller, or both).- Great airflow, nice mesh design acts as a filter, easy to wipe off with a soft cloth.- Plenty of room for fans. I've outfitted mine with 2 140mm intake fans up front, 1 120mm exhaust in back, and a single 140mm and 120mm on a top-mounted AIO.- Intel 12600K CPU sees 64°C max temp with a slight OC to 5.1GHz, all power limits disabled, in Prime 95 Small FFTs for over 30-minutes.- Asus nVidia RTX 3070 Strix GPU, a 2.9-slot wide card, stays in the mid-60s range while gaming.- 5.25" bay, nice for those who can use it. I don't have an ODD, but I wanted a case with the bay to put a sensor panel.There are no holes on top of the PSU basement, but a nearly 3-slot GPU can breathe just fine in the case. A 4-slot GPU might have a more difficult time with airflow. The top has room for 2 140mm fans. The case officially supports a 240mm AIO up top. I put a 280mm AIO there (not officially supported), but had to use a 120mm fan on one side to clear the motherboard VRM. Using the 5.25" bay will prevent use of a top-mounted AIO or a 2nd case fan up top. I got around that limitation by 3D printing a custom shallow-mount bracket for my sensor panel display. Up to a 280mm AIO can also fit up front, but may prevent orienting the tubes in the preferred tubes-down orientation. 360mm AIO up front is not officially supported, but there's enough room and I've seen people pull it off with minor modding, but that would require giving up the 5.25" bay.It comes with a single 120mm exhaust fan. I didn't use this fan so I can't attest to how well it works.Only real drawback I can think of for this case, is it's so open, you can hear all the fans quite well. If you use noisy fans, you will hear them. Choose fans wisely, if you care about noise. Nothing specific to this case, it's the nature of open mesh-style cases.

This is my second Cooler Master build, this time using the NR400. My last build was the NR200, and I've been very happy with that. This case shows similar high build quality and user friendliness, if you ignore the "instructions," which consist of a series of unhelpful "illustrations." Seriously, if you've never done this before, don't look to the instructions for how to do things. Watch some YouTube build videos instead. I bought this case as a replacement case for an older ASUS X58 system, which resided in a larger, bulkier, low airflow case. In the NR400 there is lots of room for everything, great cable management, super air flow and cooling. I replaced the two cheap supplied fans (Molex power, fixed fan speed) with decent Noctuas. It's hard to find a good mATX case with a drive bay for an optical drive. This case targets that need with good design and quality materials. It looks a lot better than the photographs, really quite a nice case with a good level of fit and finish. I'm very happy with how the build turned out.

This case basically suits all my needs.- House a whole mATX build in it and still manage to have some wiggle room.- Provide ample airflow.- The inclusion of a 5.25” external drive (e.g. DVD drive).- High quality build.- Cable grommets.- Power supply basement.- Store 3.5” hard drives and 2.5” SSDs.- Have a recessed rear I/O design, which is still standard with most cases, but some cases do not have this.- Actually save some desk space.However, the main issues:- No perforation on the topside of the power supply basement. Coming from a Phanteks Eclipse P400 (though with a front mesh panel added two years after purchasing), this tells me that the perforation is desperately needed for proper airflow from the front of the case all the way to the graphics card. The graphics card I have installed has barely half an inch to be able to breathe, and with the case acting mostly as a heatsink, this makes it easier to recirculate the same hot air the card and the hard drives are already putting out. However, it may not be a huge issue if I upgrade to a newer card that is 2-slots deep without it going too hot/point of thermal throttling. And for almost $90 (that’s how much I paid for this case; sad, I know), I would ask for much more than just a fully stamped metal frame. (The P400 and now the P400A was a little cheaper in comparison, and still provides adequate airflow on all fronts, so I doubt Cooler Master has much of an excuse for this.)- Tempered glass. It is a high quality tempered glass side panel, but it’s one more thing to put more on maintenance for. I would much prefer Cooler Master to be able to have their consumers *also* get the option to have either a fully metal side panel or a metal side panel with some perforation closest to the graphics card (basically in line with how the N200 had it) with the case, so as to have a more professional look than just reinforcing the weird gamer aesthetic that seems to be out of place. Thing is, the entire case seems more or less *designed* with “professionalism” (the whole “office” look) in mind, rather than heavily catering to gamers. So, yes, I do find this to be somewhat baffling. It makes me think that the glass side panel basically inflated its overall price, and not just because of the fact that during the manufacturing of this case, the cost of steel went up in the past year. (I’m pretty sure it is still relatively up there right now.)- Cable management points are very minimal, and spacing for it leaves a bit to be desired. As much as there is still a bit of room left for extra cabling and somewhat properly route your cables, the side panel door for the back shows the case’s overall limitations for most cables, especially SATA power cables. It’s unfortunate, but it could have been much worse—as bad as its predecessor, the N200, which has almost NO room for rear cable management. Not even for the mATX motherboard it was built for.- The rear cutout for the motherboard is a little too short. It makes it virtually impossible to add on a third-party cooler without having to either take out the motherboard, or add the cooler *prior* to installing the motherboard (depending on what you’re doing). However, this also coincides with the space needed to make the integrated SSD mounts on the rear side of the case, so I can’t say for sure how that could be really improved upon.- This doesn’t really include any velcro straps within the case for rear cable management, which is somewhat disappointing from a convenience standpoint. However, my power supply has them supplied, albeit they’re a little thick.- The bottom intake for the power supply has only just a square mesh that is barely held onto by tabs, and no mesh cover with a frame. This makes it bring about issues with maintenance and the ability to keep most dust out of the power supply.Overall: for a budget case, this is quite a lot you can ask for, but a lot of the shortcomings appear to be unique to my scenario, rather than in most cases where this may not be a problem—but the issue with SATA power cables still stands, since this case is designed to include a SATA-powered 5.25” drive.