Cooler Master Cosmos II: Large and in Charge

Noise and Thermal Testing, Stock

I've maintained, for better or worse, that the only way you're going to get excellent cooling performance and acoustics in the same package is by spending up. That's not to take away from awesome budget performers like the Bitfenix Shinobi, but in my experience behemoths like the Cooler Master Cosmos II can usually at least justify their high price tags by offering the best of both worlds. Let's see if the Cosmos II can live up to that standard.

So far so good. The Cosmos II is the most expensive case we've tested, but it also generally offers the best cooling performance. Despite that, pay attention to how it trades blows with Rosewill's Thor v2 and keep in mind that the Thor v2 is more than $200 cheaper. Also interesting is how the Lo/Med/Hi results bounce around a bit, though we'll see how that changes when we hit the higher demands of our overclocked testing.

The Cosmos II's medium fan setting turns out to be just the right balance between performance and noise. Moving up from low to medium doesn't change much in the way of noise, but produces an appreciable decrease in temperatures, while high produces a jump in noise without really justifying itself.