Closer Look: Interior

The Cooler Master HAF XM, while just a Mid-Tower case, can fit a lot inside of it. In fact, it can fit motherboards of all sizes up to E-ATX. That means you can fit almost any gaming or enthusiast grade motherboard inside this thing. There are a few that won't fit, but most will. In addition, there is plenty of room for long video cards inside the HAF XM as well. With the HDD cage installed, you have room for GPUs up to 13.9" in length. You can also remove the HDD cage and fit GPUs over 18" in length.

If you use the two 3.5" external bays as the hot swappable bays, there is space for eight 3.5" hard drives. Any of those can be used for 2.5" drives as well and there is a hidden 2.5" drive bay on the back of the motherboard tray right under the CPU socket access hole. The lower six drive bays can also be completely removed. I only use two drives anyway, so this could be an option for me. In its place you can have room for a longer video card or you can put a water cooling pump or radiator. Keep in mind that this is where the front intake fan pushes all of its air, so you may want to keep it open just to keep the air moving.

Both the 5.25" optical drive bays and the 3.5" hard drive bays use tool free designs. To secure a 5.25" drive bay, simply release the latch, slide in the drive, then lock the latch back into place. We'll take a look at the how the 3.5" and 2.5" drives are secured in the next section.

The PSU is mounted on the bottom of the Cooler Master HAF XM, which is something that is becoming increasingly more common. While the HAF XM doesn't sit the PSU up off the floor of the case like I have seen in the past, the feet give it about half an inch of clearance off the ground. This isn't as much as I'd like to see, but it's better than nothing. Just keep this in mind if you plan on putting the Cooler Master HAF XM on thick carpet.

Let's take a closer look at some of the interior features of this case in the next section.

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