Saying Goodbye to a Classic
Another machine gets a new home
LAST MONTH, I swapped the chassis (and a few other components) of my main work machine, and this month I’ve done the same to my home system. The aging Cooler Master Cosmos that housed the last two iterations of my home PC served me well, but it was getting a little long in the tooth in terms of looks, and was too big for what I needed. I wanted something smarter, more modern looking, and frankly something smaller.
The Corsair Crystal 570X is a mid-tower case, so it checks the downsizing box nicely, and it’s also very smart and modern looking. Prior to using it, I wasn’t sure about the RGB fans, but they’re not as garish as I feared, especially after cycling through the presets to find a subtle purple glow. The triple fans do a great job of keeping the rig cool, too.
Making the move wasn’t without its problems, with the 12V ATX CPU cable in the old Cosmos stretching across the motherboard and under the graphics card to reach the slot. Despite the slighter small proportions of the new case, it was a tough fit here as well, although I did manage to route the cable around the back of the mobo and hook it around the top. It’s not very pretty if you look at the rear of the machine, but without buying a new power supply, there’s not much else I could do.
The cabling for the drives was frustrating, too, with the initial setup refusing to spot the OS drive because the SATA power cable had slipped out of the drive. It’s annoying that the data cables use spring clips, while the power cables don’t. Once I’d sorted out the cabling properly, this was less of a problem, but I’d still prefer clip-in cables.
One offshoot of the move is that there’s no room for an optical drive now. To be fair, while the drive was in the old Cosmos, I hadn’t hooked it up to the mobo in the last build, so it clearly wasn’t an essential part of my computing regime. But it may come in useful one day, so instead of heading to the recycling center with the Cosmos, it’s made its way into the tech purgatory in the attic for now. You know, just in case….