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Coolermaster Centurion 530 Review

It wasn't that long ago that Coolermaster was being trashed all over the Internet for being a company that only produced mediocre heatsinks for the Socket A/370 platforms. What a long way we have come. Coolermaster has built a name for itself for making a wide variety of products - cases, air and water coolers, heatsink compounds and much more. They have released some high-end cases such as the Wavemaster and the Stacker, and put them on a similar level as Lian Li and Antec.

Today we are looking at Coolermaster's newest case, the Centurion 530. The 530 is a mid-tower built in a similar fashion to the renowned full-tower Stacker, with a couple of unique differences that makes it much more suitable for home users. The 530 is a medium-high end case, with most of the case being built out of steel and only the poles on the side made out of aluminum.

First Impressions

At first glance, the 530 is easily mistaken for the Stacker. When I first opened the box, I could have sworn I was asked to review the Stacker. Taking a closer look, you could see that this case was a very different beast. The biggest visual difference are the aluminum bars on the side, which supposedly provides extra vertical support for the case, but since the entire industry has never had a problem with weak vertical support, we can safely say that the bars are just there for eye candy. That's not to say it's a bad idea - in fact, the bars accentuate the black of the case and makes it look far better than the plain black mesh that constitutes the stacker. The lack of a side window is disappointing for some (considering even the cheapest cases can be purchased with a side window now), but there is a very specific reason for this decision, and we'll deal with it later.