A Closer Look - Interior

To gain access to the interior, simply remove the thumb screws holding each fan in place and then pull on the latch to release the panel. As is the case with most enclosures nowadays, the HAF XM is all black inside. Cooler Master has taken the opportunity and added or updated a few things within the chassis. There are plenty of holes to route cabling through and the large cutout in the tray will give you easy access to the underside of an installed motherboard. You may also mount a single SSD just below this opening, which is ideally the OS drive for example.


In the front are six 3.5/2.5 inch bays, each equipped with the same type of tray system we have seen in other Cooler Master cases as of late. You may remove the side panel of the top cage, allowing you to install long graphics cards while still having three bays to fill with drives. A large 200 mm, red LED equipped fan cools all six drive bays. It comes with a 3-pin motherboard header and a Molex adapter if you would like to plug it straight into the PSU, but you do not need an additional power source for the LEDs.


Above that is the hot-swap bay, with a PCB backplate. You may install up to two 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives here for easy access. I think a single such bay would have been more than enough, with the other one free for a card reader or fan controller instead. The three 5.25 inch bays come with a screw-less locking system, which is intuitive and actually works surprisingly well, as we will see later on.


The PSU bay is nothing really out of the ordinary by itself, but Cooler Master has included a type of cover to hide your cable mess below it. This is a nice little touch, but makes the PSU installation and the cable wiring a bit more time consuming than it should be. With most PSUs being modular nowadays anyways many may just decide to remove this cover completely. For the sake of this review, we will use it of course, to show you the benefits of such an addition. All of the nine expansion bays are protected by individual covers held in place by thumb screws. The 140 mm fan in the rear also comes with a 3-pin motherboard header, attached to a Molex adapter. Unlike the one in the front, it does not have any LEDs and features an all black design.


With the 200 mm fan in the ceiling, we count a total of three cooling units within the HAF XM. Due to the fact that HAF stands for High Air Flow, it should be no surprise to find two 200 mm variants within its bowels. Interestingly enough, the underside of the case does not have a real dust filter, just a second layer of large metal mesh. I would have liked to see a removable, washable filter here to protect the PSU from dirt.


All the cables within the HAF XM are black and of the standard variety. Cooler Master does not include a USB 3.0 to USB 2.0 adapter, so those still using a board without the plug, will be left with only two USB 2.0 plugs to use in the front I/O.