**Master Series Five and Master Series Five Pro Review: A Modular Marvel**

The Master Series Five from Cooler Master is a case that has been making waves in the PC building community, and for good reason. Its modular design allows users to upgrade their cooling system with ease, making it an attractive option for those who want to try water cooling without breaking the bank. But how does this case perform in real-world use? In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Master Series Five and its Pro variant.

**Easy Installation of Upgrades**

One of the standout features of the Master Series Five is its easy installation of upgrades. According to our tester, installing the kit was "really really easy" and only took a couple of minutes. The case comes with various hard drive cages that can be removed, allowing users to fit in 280mm radiators on top or front of the case. This level of modularity is perfect for those who want to upgrade their cooling system without having to swap out their entire case.

**A Minor Complaint: Top Mesh Piece**

Despite its ease of installation, our tester had one minor complaint about the Master Series Five: the top mesh piece doesn't stay in place as well as they would like. It slides in and out easily, and can be prone to coming up if not secured properly. While this isn't a major issue, it's something that Cooler Master should consider addressing in future iterations of the case.

**A Solid Design**

The Master Series Five has a solid design that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. The case retains its original handles on top, side panels, and everything else works seamlessly without any flexing or creaking. This suggests that Cooler Master has done a great job in terms of designing the exterior of the case.

**Why this Case Exists**

The Master Series Five exists because many PC builders are hesitant to try water cooling due to fear of complexity and cost. By offering a modular design that allows users to upgrade their cooling system without breaking the bank, Cooler Master is catering to those who want to try water cooling but don't know where to start.

**A Solution for PC Builders**

One of the main reasons we like the Master Series Five is its ability to solve a common problem faced by many PC builders: not being able to upgrade their case's cooling system. By allowing users to buy the base kit and then upgrading later, Cooler Master has created a solution that caters to the needs of PC builders who want to try water cooling without having to swap out their entire case.

**280mm Radiators: Enough for Most Users**

The Master Series Five supports 280mm radiators, which is more than enough for most users. This means that even SLI and Crossfire setups with two graphics cards and a CPU can be cooled with ease. However, it's worth noting that AMD graphics cards like the RX 3900 series may require some tweaking to fit into this case.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the Master Series Five from Cooler Master is a modular marvel that offers a solution for PC builders who want to try water cooling without breaking the bank. Its easy installation of upgrades and solid design make it an attractive option for those looking to upgrade their cooling system. While there are some minor complaints about the top mesh piece, these can be addressed with future updates.

**Future Developments**

Finally, Cooler Master has hinted at future developments in this line, including a new Pro variant that will offer even more features and improvements. We'll have to wait and see what's in store for the Master Series Five Pro, but we're excited to find out.

**Conclusion**

That's all for today, folks! Thanks for watching, and don't forget to check out our blog for more PC-related content. We'll be heading to Vlogger Fair soon, so come say hi if you see us there.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and today we're gonna talk about a product that was making a splash at Computex while some companies are out there doing the best they can to try and imitate others other companies were out there actually innovating and today we're gonna be talking about the Coolermaster mastercase 5 and some of the upgrades available for this because this is actually a modular case in the sense that it's not just modular on the inside it's also modular on the outside I'm going to spare you guys the actual unboxing part of this because I'm really terrible at unboxing things it's a good thing I'm not an unboxing channel because I would starve to death the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features eight phase-- PWM 4 Way SLI support along with top notch components to offer gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more here's the way that the master case looks and it's kind of a native naked format you've got massive grill on the front here giving you plenty of airflow you've got two five and a quarter bay expandable drives on the front power switch a USB 3.0 headphone jack mic jack or two USB 3.0 and then of course your reset button on the top here you have two handles that are mounted directly to the frame of the case so as you can see you can carry your system by these you can see they are not flimsy otherwise I wouldn't be picking up the case like that so you can transport your case that way speaking of lifting it up like that on the top you can see you have two 120 millimeter or two 140 millimeter exhaust fans on the top or expandability I should say there's no fans in there and then on the back I'm gonna probably break an arm during this review it the way I'm twisting everything around at the back you have a pre-installed 140 millimeter exhaust fan you also have right here your power supply installation bracket if you can't tell we're just kind of getting right into the specs on this guide so you install the power supply to this thing then you slide it in and screw that to the back of the case I'm not entirely sure I guess why they went that route but they did I'm just trying to of why they couldn't have just made it so you mounted on there the normal way I guess they want to stick with the slide in method I'm not I'm not sure I don't they give you a condom with it though but it is raised up off the ground quite a bit almost an inch actually so if you were going to be putting this on carpet or something like that you could still install the power supply the traditional method of the fan pointing down you're not going to worry about your carpet clogging up the intake vent on the bottom keeping air flow from making it into the power supply so you could still install the traditional method taking off the side panel here of course captive thumb screws so that you don't lose those and then of course you know thumb screws that let's see if I can do this well some manufacturers seem to think thumb screws should be installed with tools so it is pretty much a mid-tower case but it's mid-tower case that makes really good use of the space available to it so you can get really good efficiency of use of that space in the mid tower so all the cables inside are black which is nice but then again it doesn't really matter if you're not going to be upgrading the modular aspects of the case to a side panel with a window in it you're not going to see anything on the inside anyway but it is nice that they do give you you know all black cables you can see here too that you have separation of the main component area of the case as well as the power supply on the bottom so the power supply is going to be its own little environment where the heat is not going to cross contaminate where if you've got load going with the machine power supply heat is not going to make its way into the case and vice versa heat in the case is not going to make its way into the power supply area causing you know cost contamination of heat I say cross contamination I just don't know what other word to use honestly the five and a quarter locks could not be any easier to use you literally slide in the expansion whatever it's going to be fan controllers DVD blu-ray drive whatever and slide that to locked and it's not going anywhere so there's no tools needed there's no parts to lose there's none of that mess now you do have a box of parts right here which is going to be radiator mounts and fan splitters and motherboard standoffs nice nice black box there you're not gonna normally they'll give you something that looks you know cardboard II is black and then here's your flexible hard drive cage which you simply or sled you just slide it on in there now the hard drive cages themselves are also modular and you've got many different mounting points of where you could put those and I'm just gonna once again thumbscrews that apparently are not meant to be used with your phone so it's actually got these little rubber tabs on the back right here that just line up in these holes so you can literally just put it wherever you want so right now we'll just stick it right here pop that in like that and then you tighten down the screws and then your hard drive cage is moved and of course you can expand the amount of hard drive cages that go in here we'll talk about that when we upgrade this to the master case five pro which we're going to do in just a few minutes in this video in fact to prepare for that I'm going to go ahead and remove this thing out of here entirely alright so you have two SSD mounts right here on the floorboard of the main compartment they once again or just one captive thumb screw you mount your SSD to it you've got pass-through holes right here so that your SATA power and SATA cable can pass through to behind the motherboard tray and couldn't once again ask for anything easier I think ease-of-use is obviously a huge theme on this this is my first time seeing this I wasn't at Computex so I didn't get to see any of this on the front you do have a 2 140 millimeter or two 120 millimeter fan expansions you also have a cutout right here on the floorboard of the motherboard tray that's going to give you enough room to mount a radiator on the front if you want to go to the front mounted radiator now one thing to note on the top here at least in the standard mastercase 5 is there's not going to be enough room for a radiator and fans at least on the inside of the case because you don't have enough clearance to the top of the motherboard so natively the mastercase 5 in its standard format it's not really going to be all-in-one or custom water cooling loop very at least very friendly you could probably somehow mod it and put the radiator on top and then have the tubes come around the back or something but that wouldn't be very pretty not to mention they do give you an option to upgrade that once again we'll talk about that in a minute let's go and take a look at the backside see how much room we have in here for cable management because that's one of the things I think really matter with cases these days especially with first time builders is giving users real intuitive ways to deal with cable management in the old days cases just we're kind of like you're on your own buddy you got to figure out what to do with the cables but manufacturers of obviously over the years learn that cable management really isn't that hard to integrate into your case so you can see right here we have a nice deep channel right behind where the motherboard or right behind where the hard drive cages go so you can route cables down here velcro strap already in place and then you've got grommet hair grommet here grommet here you've got grommets on the bottom of the motherboard floor you got holes right here on the cutout for the fans holes here for fans and then of course as you can see here the entire bottom of the case is just wide open so having a place to put your extra cables and things you're not using you're going to be entirely out of view so this is a case where you have really no excuse to have a jumbled mess of wires all right so let's go ahead and do this now that we've kind of run through the basics why don't we go ahead and upgrade this thing to a master case five Pro and let's go ahead and compare transition so as you can see clearly we've got a massive side window on here but what's also kind of neat is it's got this sort of a smoked acrylic plate on the bottom that makes the where the power supply is you know a little bit harder to see through I mean you can still sort of see through that not sure how well see you can still kind of see through that on the bottom but anyway it's nice because it brings the focus of your attention up in here to the top of the case where it matters so the other pieces that come with the mastercase 5 upgrade kit is a more Drive cages in fact I even have an extra one right here because I could take out the five and a quarter base also with the captive thumb screws and put more hard drives up there another hard drive cage up there if I don't need the five and a quarter now the upgrade kit is also not just about you know the side panel and these hard drive cage is you do get additional SSD mounting as well as water cooling support for the top now simply all you have to do on the top is add this mesh piece which you can see covers up the new radiator mounted bracket which gives us about 25 millimetres extra height so you can fit either to 120 s or to 140 s up here as well as a 30 millimeter radiator at the bottom and still have plenty of clearance so you could run to 280 millimeter radiators in this if you wanted to one on the top one on the front if you remove these hard drive cages so it really depends on what your needs are but installing that the kit was actually really really easy it only took me a couple of minutes the only complaint I really have though about this is that the top mesh piece doesn't really stay in place as well as I think it should you can see it slides in and out pretty easily and comes up so I wish that snapped in a little better or even maybe had a captive thumb screw in the back to keep it from sliding off so if I had any sort of not really a complaint but just more of a an improvement to the design I think that would have been it but other than that the case is pretty solid you still retain your you know your handles here on the top as you can see with the side panels and everything on we're still holding that with no problems no flexing no Creek and I think that Coolermaster has done a really fantastic design with this case of a lot of companies have really focused on interior modularity but not really anything to do with the exterior ok now giving you a demo of you know how it comes out of the out of the box of giving you a demo of how you could upgrade it to the pro kit there's even another upgrade level to this that still to be determined it's not ready yet but even replaces like the front and starts to look really cool with lots of aluminum and stuff in there now let's go and talk about why I think this case exists and why I think it's a good thing now I can't tell you how many times I have seen messages both comments and Twitter and Instagram and emails and Facebook asking me hey you know what I'm ready to try water cooling but my case doesn't support water cooling what do you recommend that upgrade to now a lot of times when people build a PC especially if it's their first time they'll think to themselves you know I don't really want to try that water cooling stuff that's kind of scary we'll deal with that later so they'll buy a case that's a small mid tower case that maybe doesn't support very much water cooling out of the box and then they're stuck with having to swap everything over into a new chassis once they're ready to try it out so what this allows someone to do is buy the base kit which looks fantastic it's all like ninja black you can put some lighting in there you can go with any color scheme you want black blue black red black white black yellow black black I guess whatever and over time if you decide well I want to try water cooling for just the price of the upgrade kit you can do that and you don't have to swap out all of your internals into another case meaning now you have a case that you got to stick in the garage or try and sell or give away or just throw in the garbage or hopefully recycle now you can keep your chassis because so let's hope you liked it to begin with that's why you bought it and now you can upgrade it as your needs and your desires and your wants and your enthusiasm for PC building evolve as well so I really like seeing not only the interior modularity but the exterior modularity as well so being able to fit to 280 millimeter radiators in this is more than enough for most people that could cool an SL I'd water-cooled system with two graphics cards and a CPU for from most graphics cards that's not going to be an issue even to AMD graphics cards like three and ninety exes could be cooled with that type of configuration so there you go guys the master five and the master five pro from cooler master I understand now why they had some awards at Computex for this case design and I'm actually pretty excited to do something with this I'll be building as a project I'll be building in this later on probably in September and we'll see what we can come up with but that's all for today guys tell me what you think of the modular design do you think cooler master is going in the right direction or do you think that they are just kind of out in left-field and have no idea what they're really trying to do with this I know what they're trying to do with this but you guys are the customers so speak up they like to read these comments and if you've got something constructive to say do it constructively that that's how we get things done around here alright guys I'm gonna get out of here thanks for watching heading to blogger faire in a couple of days you guys going to be there come say hi otherwise just check out the blogs while I'm there vlogging at vlogger fair is kind of a kind of a prereq anyway alright guys I'll see you in the next onehey what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and today we're gonna talk about a product that was making a splash at Computex while some companies are out there doing the best they can to try and imitate others other companies were out there actually innovating and today we're gonna be talking about the Coolermaster mastercase 5 and some of the upgrades available for this because this is actually a modular case in the sense that it's not just modular on the inside it's also modular on the outside I'm going to spare you guys the actual unboxing part of this because I'm really terrible at unboxing things it's a good thing I'm not an unboxing channel because I would starve to death the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features eight phase-- PWM 4 Way SLI support along with top notch components to offer gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more here's the way that the master case looks and it's kind of a native naked format you've got massive grill on the front here giving you plenty of airflow you've got two five and a quarter bay expandable drives on the front power switch a USB 3.0 headphone jack mic jack or two USB 3.0 and then of course your reset button on the top here you have two handles that are mounted directly to the frame of the case so as you can see you can carry your system by these you can see they are not flimsy otherwise I wouldn't be picking up the case like that so you can transport your case that way speaking of lifting it up like that on the top you can see you have two 120 millimeter or two 140 millimeter exhaust fans on the top or expandability I should say there's no fans in there and then on the back I'm gonna probably break an arm during this review it the way I'm twisting everything around at the back you have a pre-installed 140 millimeter exhaust fan you also have right here your power supply installation bracket if you can't tell we're just kind of getting right into the specs on this guide so you install the power supply to this thing then you slide it in and screw that to the back of the case I'm not entirely sure I guess why they went that route but they did I'm just trying to of why they couldn't have just made it so you mounted on there the normal way I guess they want to stick with the slide in method I'm not I'm not sure I don't they give you a condom with it though but it is raised up off the ground quite a bit almost an inch actually so if you were going to be putting this on carpet or something like that you could still install the power supply the traditional method of the fan pointing down you're not going to worry about your carpet clogging up the intake vent on the bottom keeping air flow from making it into the power supply so you could still install the traditional method taking off the side panel here of course captive thumb screws so that you don't lose those and then of course you know thumb screws that let's see if I can do this well some manufacturers seem to think thumb screws should be installed with tools so it is pretty much a mid-tower case but it's mid-tower case that makes really good use of the space available to it so you can get really good efficiency of use of that space in the mid tower so all the cables inside are black which is nice but then again it doesn't really matter if you're not going to be upgrading the modular aspects of the case to a side panel with a window in it you're not going to see anything on the inside anyway but it is nice that they do give you you know all black cables you can see here too that you have separation of the main component area of the case as well as the power supply on the bottom so the power supply is going to be its own little environment where the heat is not going to cross contaminate where if you've got load going with the machine power supply heat is not going to make its way into the case and vice versa heat in the case is not going to make its way into the power supply area causing you know cost contamination of heat I say cross contamination I just don't know what other word to use honestly the five and a quarter locks could not be any easier to use you literally slide in the expansion whatever it's going to be fan controllers DVD blu-ray drive whatever and slide that to locked and it's not going anywhere so there's no tools needed there's no parts to lose there's none of that mess now you do have a box of parts right here which is going to be radiator mounts and fan splitters and motherboard standoffs nice nice black box there you're not gonna normally they'll give you something that looks you know cardboard II is black and then here's your flexible hard drive cage which you simply or sled you just slide it on in there now the hard drive cages themselves are also modular and you've got many different mounting points of where you could put those and I'm just gonna once again thumbscrews that apparently are not meant to be used with your phone so it's actually got these little rubber tabs on the back right here that just line up in these holes so you can literally just put it wherever you want so right now we'll just stick it right here pop that in like that and then you tighten down the screws and then your hard drive cage is moved and of course you can expand the amount of hard drive cages that go in here we'll talk about that when we upgrade this to the master case five pro which we're going to do in just a few minutes in this video in fact to prepare for that I'm going to go ahead and remove this thing out of here entirely alright so you have two SSD mounts right here on the floorboard of the main compartment they once again or just one captive thumb screw you mount your SSD to it you've got pass-through holes right here so that your SATA power and SATA cable can pass through to behind the motherboard tray and couldn't once again ask for anything easier I think ease-of-use is obviously a huge theme on this this is my first time seeing this I wasn't at Computex so I didn't get to see any of this on the front you do have a 2 140 millimeter or two 120 millimeter fan expansions you also have a cutout right here on the floorboard of the motherboard tray that's going to give you enough room to mount a radiator on the front if you want to go to the front mounted radiator now one thing to note on the top here at least in the standard mastercase 5 is there's not going to be enough room for a radiator and fans at least on the inside of the case because you don't have enough clearance to the top of the motherboard so natively the mastercase 5 in its standard format it's not really going to be all-in-one or custom water cooling loop very at least very friendly you could probably somehow mod it and put the radiator on top and then have the tubes come around the back or something but that wouldn't be very pretty not to mention they do give you an option to upgrade that once again we'll talk about that in a minute let's go and take a look at the backside see how much room we have in here for cable management because that's one of the things I think really matter with cases these days especially with first time builders is giving users real intuitive ways to deal with cable management in the old days cases just we're kind of like you're on your own buddy you got to figure out what to do with the cables but manufacturers of obviously over the years learn that cable management really isn't that hard to integrate into your case so you can see right here we have a nice deep channel right behind where the motherboard or right behind where the hard drive cages go so you can route cables down here velcro strap already in place and then you've got grommet hair grommet here grommet here you've got grommets on the bottom of the motherboard floor you got holes right here on the cutout for the fans holes here for fans and then of course as you can see here the entire bottom of the case is just wide open so having a place to put your extra cables and things you're not using you're going to be entirely out of view so this is a case where you have really no excuse to have a jumbled mess of wires all right so let's go ahead and do this now that we've kind of run through the basics why don't we go ahead and upgrade this thing to a master case five Pro and let's go ahead and compare transition so as you can see clearly we've got a massive side window on here but what's also kind of neat is it's got this sort of a smoked acrylic plate on the bottom that makes the where the power supply is you know a little bit harder to see through I mean you can still sort of see through that not sure how well see you can still kind of see through that on the bottom but anyway it's nice because it brings the focus of your attention up in here to the top of the case where it matters so the other pieces that come with the mastercase 5 upgrade kit is a more Drive cages in fact I even have an extra one right here because I could take out the five and a quarter base also with the captive thumb screws and put more hard drives up there another hard drive cage up there if I don't need the five and a quarter now the upgrade kit is also not just about you know the side panel and these hard drive cage is you do get additional SSD mounting as well as water cooling support for the top now simply all you have to do on the top is add this mesh piece which you can see covers up the new radiator mounted bracket which gives us about 25 millimetres extra height so you can fit either to 120 s or to 140 s up here as well as a 30 millimeter radiator at the bottom and still have plenty of clearance so you could run to 280 millimeter radiators in this if you wanted to one on the top one on the front if you remove these hard drive cages so it really depends on what your needs are but installing that the kit was actually really really easy it only took me a couple of minutes the only complaint I really have though about this is that the top mesh piece doesn't really stay in place as well as I think it should you can see it slides in and out pretty easily and comes up so I wish that snapped in a little better or even maybe had a captive thumb screw in the back to keep it from sliding off so if I had any sort of not really a complaint but just more of a an improvement to the design I think that would have been it but other than that the case is pretty solid you still retain your you know your handles here on the top as you can see with the side panels and everything on we're still holding that with no problems no flexing no Creek and I think that Coolermaster has done a really fantastic design with this case of a lot of companies have really focused on interior modularity but not really anything to do with the exterior ok now giving you a demo of you know how it comes out of the out of the box of giving you a demo of how you could upgrade it to the pro kit there's even another upgrade level to this that still to be determined it's not ready yet but even replaces like the front and starts to look really cool with lots of aluminum and stuff in there now let's go and talk about why I think this case exists and why I think it's a good thing now I can't tell you how many times I have seen messages both comments and Twitter and Instagram and emails and Facebook asking me hey you know what I'm ready to try water cooling but my case doesn't support water cooling what do you recommend that upgrade to now a lot of times when people build a PC especially if it's their first time they'll think to themselves you know I don't really want to try that water cooling stuff that's kind of scary we'll deal with that later so they'll buy a case that's a small mid tower case that maybe doesn't support very much water cooling out of the box and then they're stuck with having to swap everything over into a new chassis once they're ready to try it out so what this allows someone to do is buy the base kit which looks fantastic it's all like ninja black you can put some lighting in there you can go with any color scheme you want black blue black red black white black yellow black black I guess whatever and over time if you decide well I want to try water cooling for just the price of the upgrade kit you can do that and you don't have to swap out all of your internals into another case meaning now you have a case that you got to stick in the garage or try and sell or give away or just throw in the garbage or hopefully recycle now you can keep your chassis because so let's hope you liked it to begin with that's why you bought it and now you can upgrade it as your needs and your desires and your wants and your enthusiasm for PC building evolve as well so I really like seeing not only the interior modularity but the exterior modularity as well so being able to fit to 280 millimeter radiators in this is more than enough for most people that could cool an SL I'd water-cooled system with two graphics cards and a CPU for from most graphics cards that's not going to be an issue even to AMD graphics cards like three and ninety exes could be cooled with that type of configuration so there you go guys the master five and the master five pro from cooler master I understand now why they had some awards at Computex for this case design and I'm actually pretty excited to do something with this I'll be building as a project I'll be building in this later on probably in September and we'll see what we can come up with but that's all for today guys tell me what you think of the modular design do you think cooler master is going in the right direction or do you think that they are just kind of out in left-field and have no idea what they're really trying to do with this I know what they're trying to do with this but you guys are the customers so speak up they like to read these comments and if you've got something constructive to say do it constructively that that's how we get things done around here alright guys I'm gonna get out of here thanks for watching heading to blogger faire in a couple of days you guys going to be there come say hi otherwise just check out the blogs while I'm there vlogging at vlogger fair is kind of a kind of a prereq anyway alright guys I'll see you in the next one\n"