Cooler Master Storm Scout Mid-Tower Case Review

Cooling Performance pg.2


Hard drive cooling is an often overlooked aspect of case cooling, but it is perhaps one of the most important. It is a fact that hard drives kept cool outlive hard drives that run at higher temperatures. This becomes even more important with high-RPM drives like the Western Digital Raptor series. As you can see, the drive in the open bench configuration received no active cooling, and quickly exceeded 40°C.

When it comes to hard drive cooling, the Scout is actually the best of the lot. It shaved a full two degrees off of the Spedo and Sniper. The large 140mm front intake fan sits very close to the hard drive cage, and there aren’t any drive caddies in the way to restrict airflow.


The Scout is a few degrees toastier when it comes to PSU cooling in comparison to our other cases. The smaller size of the case was likely the main contributor to this. None the less, PSU temperatures were definitely maintained at very reasonable levels.


In our side panel fan testing, we see that the ideal orientation is to install two fans in an intake orientation. This allowed us to net a two degree improvement in CPU temperatures, while having the fan in an exhaust orientation actually interfered with the down-draft heatsink fan, negatively impacting CPU temperatures. With the top fan acting as an intake and lower fan exhausting, we saw no benefit to CPU temperature.


As you can see, the dual intake fan orientation definitely excels at cooling the area expansion slot area of the board. A very significant 10°C delta can be realized in this configuration. When mounted as exhaust fans, the side panel fans still manage a decent five degree decrease.


GPU load temperatures were favourably impacted regardless of the side panel fan configuration. Having both fans in an intake or exhaust position yielded almost identical results and a four degree decrease. Although this may not seem significant, it does help.