Cooler Master ATCS 840 Full Tower Case Review

Interior Impressions

When you take off the side panel ,the cavernous interior becomes readily apparent. This of course was not a surprise as this case is frickin’ huge (and probably big enough to eat smaller cases); but the scary thing is that it is actually wider than a HAF 932 and that is saying a lot! To be precise, this case is 243mm wide x 580mm high x 630 long; or to continue with our main theme this case is officially 13mm wider, 35mm taller and 55mm longer than a HAF 932. Any way you slice it, this is not a small case and what really drives home the shear enormity of this case is not its measurements but its weight. That ATCS 840 may be made entirely out of lightweight aluminum but it still weighs in at a gross weight of 34.72 lbs!


Once you get over the size of it (and listening to your own echo’ed “helllooooo” coming from inside) the next interesting factoid is this bad boy has a internal brace bar running from the front to the back on both sides. It appears that Cooler Master feared this case may twist or torque if they didn’t include two stiffening rods. This is partially true since the removable motherboard tray will cause the case to bend and flex once it is removed.


Actually, saying the motherboard tray is removable is a little bit disingenuous as a majority of the side and most of the back of this case comes with the motherboard tray when you remove it. The motherboard tray is held in place with four small, flush mounted screws and once they are removed you can tug on the rear handle and easily slide the works out the back. In all honesty this motherboard tray setup is easily the best one we have seen, with the absolutely smoothest removal and insertion we have had the privilege of witnessing.


The secret to this smooth running removal is the genius engineers over at Cooler Master have once again raised the bar even higher and left the competition in their dust. What those wizards have done to remove most of the friction usually encountered in sliding two pieces of metal across each other by incorporated two rows of ball bearings in the motherboard tray’s track. Bloody brilliant!!

While we are talking about the motherboard tray, we would be remiss in not mentioning that this case also incorporates that ground breaking CPU backplate cutout. This may only be the second case Cooler Master has on the market which includes it but it certainly is nice to see this technology “trickle up” from their mid-range line to their high end kit.


As with the HAF 932, Cooler Master has once again gone for their patented one click tool-less locking mechanism for the six 5.25 bays. The only thing better than their intuitive user friendliness is the speed at which you can lock down any 5.25 device with one of these bad boys. Of course, if you want you can opt out of this tool free mechanism and use the old fashioned screw based mounting system. Please note, as with the HAF 932, this tool-free mechanism is only on one side so if you are looking for a decent compromise between the two extremes you can always use the tool-free method for the left side and then screw in the device on the right.


Moving unto the drive cage we instantly noticed Cooler Master has upped the internal 3.5” count from five to six. As with the HAF 932, this drive cage is mounted perpendicular to the 5.25 bays and while we are not a fan of this setup (as it does cause airflow dead zones and makes the front fan work that much harder to properly set up air flow) it does have it benefits. The biggest of these is that it makes installation of your hard drive a snap. When you add in a removable drive caddy for each of the 5 hard drive slots you end up with a very fast and easy installation method. All in all, it appears that Cooler Master basically took the HAF 932 drive cage and added in an extra drive caddy. This is certainly not a bad thing as we found the HAFs drive system to be a very good compromise.