Cooler Master Scout 2 LAN Gaming Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,314 words · ~11 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the cmstorm scout 2 this is the second
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Scout and it brings with it some incremental upgrades and actually looks
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pretty freaking cool from the outside of the box anyway but we've yet to get it
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open so let's start with what Cooler Master has to say for themselves first
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of all there is one 120 mm red LED fan
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okay seven expansion slot so you won't be putting any XL ATX motherboards in
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here but 99% of the boards out there are
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standard ATX or MX anyway slide out dust filter large rubber gmts for improved
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Cable Management okay seven hard drive Bays one 2 and 1 12 in bracket included
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removable hard drive cage for o long graphics card installation okay top
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exhaust vent release heat steel reinforced carrying oh carrying handles
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excellent tool free Optical drives usb3 ports for fast charging and file
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transfer dual 120 mm fan support and
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mesh design let's open it up and have a look so Cooler Master has a number of
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different series of cases that are specifically optimized for cooling and
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gaming and all of that good stuff so the Scout is more along the well more along
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the value lines compared to something like you know a half X or or whatever
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else like that which isn't to say that the
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Scout just because it doesn't have the half or high air flow monitor is not to
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say that it is not perfectly capable of keeping your system cool so we've got
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some okay panel installation guy let's not worry too much about that and let's
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get the case opened up here I like the handle
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already so if you guys do or don't attend land parties honestly it doesn't
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really matter because either way a handle is a really handy thing to have
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for your case because if you're unboxing it you might find that you want to pick
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it up at some point the handle is extremely sturdy actually I'm really
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impressed by that and it has a rubberized grip on it that makes it much
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more comfortable to use than plastic stra plain PL plastic handle so you can
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see the flexibility there but also the fact that there is no give to it
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whatsoever so there's a metal core here with a rubber coating on the outside
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it's actually it's great you can easily carry your system around like this
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especially if you're stronger than me it's not quite like the uh like the
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handles on the Cosmos 2 which have those uh those beautiful metal bars running
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down both sides of the top of it but I mean this is a more value oriented case
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again than the Cosmos 2 so we can't criticize it too much for that so we've
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got fully stealth front IO there's your power and reset switches as well as
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control for the LEDs right there is where you'll find your two USB 3.0 ports
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two USB 2.0 ports as well as your front panel
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audio okay on the front of the case full
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mesh so three 5 and 1/4 in bays and then
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a filter see you can see there's a filtered uh there's a filtered layer
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here as well as a honeycomb mesh layer so the full front of it is mesh and the
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bottom actually has a little bit of room for intake as well we're going to try
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popping that off and see what we find here just for just for lulls right okay
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so here we find another couple of 120 mm
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fan mounts so that will give us lots of air flow from that front honeycomb here
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we've also got all the cages for our 5 and 1/4 in Baye and not a whole lot else
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at the front one of the things I like about this is that it doesn't have any
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of the front IO pieces attached to it because a lot of the time you go to pull
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this off the case and you end up kind of tugging on those delicate whoopsie
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daisies speaking of
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delicate there we go back on uh you end
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up tugging on those delicate wires and potentially damaging them so I do I do
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worry about that this side panel is pretty straightforward you can see
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Cooler Master has out the uh the right
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side panel a little bit in order to give you extra room for cable management this
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is something a lot of cases have started doing I didn't really like it at first
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but I've kind of gotten over it so uh won't complain about it too much it
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looks like we lost a rubber grommet in shipping but it's probably on the inside
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of the case uh not a big deal that there
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side panel window shows you the good parts so I'm
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not a big fan of sort of weird shaped side panel Windows I've seen like l
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shaped ones and sort of bizarre stuff like that I don't mind this because it
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cuts off things like your Optical drives which you don't want to see your hard
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drives which you don't want to see just shows you the CPU socket area your
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memory you can also see you know from this kind of an angle where you'd normally be looking at it your graphics
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card but instead of taking their window
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and like drilling holes through it like this like antec did with the 1100
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they've opted to give you a smaller window and then just regular metal fan
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girls which I think is better actually
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because the great thing about these grills is if you do want to see through them you don't have to put a fan on it
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it's fairly you know fairly transparent see I'm going to stick my ARM in there
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is awkward um whereas on those Plexi
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ones you can't see through it at all because of how thick the Plexi is so
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when they do the laser cutting on it it just makes it so no almost no matter
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unless you're looking at it like dead on you just can't see through it at all
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taking out the side panel oh look at that not much Flex to that at all
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actually nice build quality on this that's one of the easiest ways to tell
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if a case has uh has gone sort of
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Premium on the materials or if they've you know tried to save a couple bucks on
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the thickness of the metal is whether there's a lot of flex even with that Plexi window in there and all these
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holes cut out there's still not a whole lot of flex in there it feels really
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good all right let's have a look at the inside of this bad boy we've got some
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included accessories whoopsy daisies let me just
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grab that thank you all right so Cable
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Management holes here they're using that
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very very very soft uh soft rubber here
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so almost no matter what you do in terms of bending it and sort of trying to ruin
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it it's going to pop right back into place and make it so that you won't see
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too much of what's on the other side remember guys there's going to be a black side panel on the other side along
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with all these black cables which is going to make it extremely stealthy um
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unless you like really go out of your way to wreck it like rip off one of
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these uh one of these pieces or something like that which I really can't
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imagine happening you've got access to all of your usual places so up here okay
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up here is going to be your eight pin up here is going to be where I would run
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these down from so I wouldn't run these through here I'd run them over here and
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then bring them down up here will'll get you up to your Optical drives um here
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will'll get you to your video cards as well as your 24 pin and one of the
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things again hey this is smart so so often you see next to the power supply
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you see something this size and then you see like three Cable Management holes up
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to the top of the case that are also the same size which would logically be a bit
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of a problem because if there's enough cables to run through three of these
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then you probably need more space at the bottom because there's there's a lot of
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cables coming up so I've run into issues with builds before in the past where
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there's not really enough room to run all the cables I need through this bottom hole so they've gone with a much
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larger one compared to the ones up here now the removable cage is from here to
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here so that'll leave three three and 1/2 in Bays even if you do remove it in
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order to install an extremely long graphics card and I can't think of any
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graphics card where you'd need anything longer than about this even something
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like a Radeon uh 6990 which was which
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very very long the 2 and 1/2 in adapter can actually be moved around and then
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this is actually compatible with up to two ssds so you can mount one SSD in the
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top and then you can flip it over and mount another SSD on the other side
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using the bottom mounting holes side mounting holes bottom mounting holes
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actually very clever very clever little thing they did and then you're just
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using your standard 3 and 1/2 in Drive
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rails pop in there and throw that back
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in wherever you want tooless mechanism
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for the 5 and 1/4 in base is pretty bog standard we've seen this before from
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Cooler Master and in terms of cooling on the top let's have a look at what
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they've got up here so hold on we never really we never really checked this out
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so it looks like there's a uh oh I might need to se figur this out
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guys so I got it off just by taking out
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the plastic tabs and you can remove it for whatever reason but I don't I can't
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think of any reason you'd want to so we're just going to put that back in
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there it looks like this case doesn't quite have the clearance that we'd need
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for a dual 120 mm Radiator in the top you can see the top of your motherboard
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is going to be right about here with your vrm and all that so this is predominantly an air cooled case and
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it's very suitable for that so let's do a quick summary of where all the cooling
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is coming from here so we've got dual 120s in the front with full mesh intake
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we've got another 120 in the bottom which should get some access to air
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these aren't the tallest feet I've seen in the past but got nice rubberized grip
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uh most people don't use this anyway cuz your power supply cables are generally
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there you've got two 120 mm exhausts in the top and finally you've got a 120 mm
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exhaust fan in the rear and this one is Led lit and is wired into the casing so
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that you can actually turn the LED on and off right and last but not least
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your power supply which has that filtered intake which was mentioned on
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the outside of the box so you can easily remove that put it back in no issues
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there oh yeah hey check this out they got one of those auxiliary uh auxiliary
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PCI bracket things so if you have a fan controller or whatever else that hooks up to one of these you don't want to
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waste one of your valuable PCI brackets in the back then you don't have to do
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that now I wonder what happened to that uh wonder what happened to that rubber
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grommet
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cameraman's pointing at it there it is all right so the rubber grommet was
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included with our case it just came out in shipping no harm no foul let's have a
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look at the accessories included and I think we're going to wrap this
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up more 3 and 1/2 in hard drive
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rails aha we've got some zip ties we've
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got a speaker we've got some screws and
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whatnot it's basically what you'd expect so what do you get with the out too you
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get a very capable air cooling case with a very very awesome built-in steel
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handle making it extremely portable very comfortable to move around and you also
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get a pretty darn good looking case with side panel window that shows off the
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best parts without showing you you know hard drives and I think that pretty much
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wraps it up thank you for checking out this video on the Scout 2 from Cooler
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Master don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more unboxings
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