Test System

Assembly

As the chassis is quite compact, I went with installing the PSU first. To do so, take out the bracket first, attach it to your power supply, and screw the whole thing back into place. Thanks to the perforations on the front, you have a bit of flexibility as to where to attach the whole thing, at least vertically.


installing a motherboard within the Q500L is naturally a bit of a tight affair, but that was to be expected. It fits well, and the only tricky area would be the top of the motherboard where the CPU power plug usually resides. A little extra patience and nimble fingers are the solution to that step of the assembly process. All other edges are surprisingly accessible with the cable-routing holes lining up perfectly between the board and PSU.


Adding both HDD and SSDs to the Masterbox requires you to take the trays off the backside before pinning them down with the supplied screws. Once filled, simply put these back into the chassis. This is really the point where you should start thinking about cable routing to make sure you can keep things as clean as possible, while still having the ability to close the side panel after assembly is complete.


As you can see, the interior of the Q500L looks perfectly fine with the cables nicely out of the way and mostly out of sight. However, take into account that I am using a modular PSU, so if yours is not, you will really have to get creative to hide everything behind the motherboard tray, for example.

Finished Looks

Once turned on, the Masterbox Q500L makes a pretty cool impression, especially due to its compact size. Both long GPUs and a large CPU cooler easily fit within chassis, with the latter being important as most people for this price segment will opt for air over liquid cooling. The power button on the side of the chassis lights up white to let you know the system is up and running.


Everything in the rear is where you would expect it to be, with the PSU cable well out of the way in the corners regardless of how you use the chassis. Last but not least, flipping the Q500L on to the side, "desktop mode" works well, too. I can see this being a configuration for those who want to place the chassis in their home entertainment environment, for example. That said, the third magnetic cover is woefully missing.


Just for kicks, here is a picture of the TPU mesh covers applied to the chassis, so you know what you can expect if you choose to change things up in the future.