The Cooler Master Elite 430 Black Case

Putting it all together

The first thing we usually do is to install the motherboard. Installing the mainboard is done by using the included spacers and screws. It should become apparent at this point, that mid-tower cases are very compact and that you do not have much room to work with. If you are going to completely fill your case with hardware, make sure you plan your assembly process very carefully.

It is wise to install the CPU and CPU cooler first along with the RAM on the motherboard and then install it into the case. Oh what a tangle of cables we see!

You can also see from the above image that in the front of the Elite 430, the bottom half is taken up by a hard drive bay which can accommodate seven hard drives by using the Cooler Master supplied HD holders (or screws). The top area is filled with the five external drive bays, two of which has a sturdy plastic sliding lock to hold your drives securely.

To install our external drives, we had to pry off the entire front of the chassis. In our next image, you can clearly see the front intake fan. The front metal mesh may help with the larger dust particles a bit, but behind all of the front grills are traps for dust and they are quite effective in keeping your case’s interior dust free.

Installing your drives is almost too easy with Cooler Master’s “tool-free” design. Just slide your hard drive into the bay, slip on the adapter and twist 90 degrees to  lock it into place. Some people may like the more secure feeling of screwing your hard drive directly into the HD cage and you can use the supplied screws instead.

Next you slide your drives into the bays and they can be locked down with the locking mechanism.  We preferred to use screws, however.

When they are seated properly, simply press down on the clip and they are locked into place. You can also use screws if you are using your PC for LAN games and want your drives secured even better.

None of the mainboard expansion slots have a screwless system in the form of plastic clips like in many other Cooler Master cases. Fortunately, they are not missed as they do not hold well, and to make it even worse, they are quite easy to break. Fortunately, Cooler Master has included black screws which we highly recommend that you use for heavy video cards like GTX 480 and HD 5870/5980.

Two of the longest video cards will fit into the Elite 300 but it takes some care, effort and mental planning to insert them if all of your bays are filled and it is impossible to fill all of the hard drive bays if you have two video cards.

Well, that was easy! Or so it seems unless we have a lot of hard drives.  Where do they go?  We see a front fan stopping them from going up against the front of the case and we see two video cards blocking three HD bays.

But we are not going to use HD 5870 CrossFire to test our Elite 430’s ability to cool the hardware inside.  For that test, we are going to use GTX 480 which is the hottest running video card available today.   Let’s see where our hard drive has to go with a much shorter single card than the reference HD 5870.

It is not so good with a single regular high end video card and multiple hard drives.  The three or perhaps four hard drives that you can actually fit in the HD cage will stay cool with the fan blowing cool air over them, however.  And we see that Cooler Master has included the correct number of hard drives locks with their case; three.  Let’s test the Elite 300’s ability to cool the hardware inside and then we will wrap our review up.