Building a scrounge-bin PC in a high-end case: Cooler Master Qube 500 Macaron Edition Review
Cooler Master is well known for, well, their CPU coolers. But they make many other products, and I came across their Qube 500 PC case kit when looking for a case for a “from spare parts” PC build. The Qube 500 comes with either black or white panels, or, in a three-color edition called Macaron, after the colorful sweet munchies. It ships with three sets of color panels, in mint green, pink and amber. Once you’ve built the case, you can switch colors as often as you like. Green on top, amber on the front. Pink in front, mint on top. You get the idea.
Building the case was pretty straightforward. It arrives as a “flatpack” — not assembled, and with all the panels laid flat in a reasonably small box. This definitely saves on the costs and emissions of shipping these things from China to North America. The box even has outline directions printed on the inner flaps, with QR codes to videos, and for the old fogies and internet’s-down-today people, there’s a sheet of assembly instructions.
The nice thing is that you can fasten the main components — the motherboard and power supply — into the case panels as you assemble it. In fact, the motherboard can go on before you even remove the back panel from the box! This will strike joy in the heart of everyone who’s bashed their knuckles trying to get the last screw into a build where components are hard to reach. In the photo above I have put my antique Mini-ITX motherboard (did I mention this was a spare parts build?) onto the backplane, and taken the power supply bracket out of the packaging. Don’t be fooled, though — the case can handle pretty much any size of mainboard you’re going to meet. As the web site puts it: “The Qube 500 can house almost anything you would expect from a larger case, from EATX Motherboards and the latest GPUs to dual 280mm radiators.” There’s also room for up to 4 3.5" disks and/or an equal number of 2.5" disks.
My original reason for building the PC was not to build the ultimate gaming PC, but:
- the realization that I had enough spare parts just lacking a case, and
- the need for a “test lab” PC that I could hack on to my heart’s content without risking deranging the MS-Windows PC that I need for work with one of my clients. Like running hours-long self-tests on a multi-terabyte hard drive to prove to the manufacturer that their disk is at fault.
So I bought this fancy case with a view to later downsize by moving the modern innards from my Windows PC into the nicer case.
The remaining assembly steps are logically laid out, and there’s not much to say. I did find some diseased-looking bad paint or painted-over rust on the power supply bracket, but it has no effect on the assembly or functioning. It took me a while to figure out the power supply orientation as their diagram didn’t really line up with the ancient 350W power supply in my parts bin.
Once the case is built, the panels on all six sides just snap on and off. For the side panels, you get one perforated and one tempered glass — this case is designed to be shown off, after all — and you can put either one on either side. I did have one issue where the side panel wouldn’t snap closed or stay closed on the motherboard side; a cable, cable-tied to the frame, was in the way. Just pushing the cable behind the frame part it was tied to fixed the problem in a jiffy.
All the perforated panels, BTW, have a standard arrangement of the holes, and all manner of accessories can be snapped in. Cooler Master hosts a few accessories you can 3D print yourself, including a GoPro mount (but this isn’t the sort of PC you’d take skiing or to a skateboard park…) and their “Gem Mini” headphone bracket. Prusa Research, one of the original sellers of quality 3D printers, held a contest in conjunction with Cooler Master, to get people to design accessories for the Qube 500 case. This resulted in a huge variety of 3D-printable add-ins.
Another issue I had with my antique motherboard was that some of the connectors on the cables from the front panel would not fit onto the older board. Fortunately the power button switch and LED works, at least! The USB3 / USB-C cable and audio cables, no so much. Of course, all it took was a $5 cable from Amazon (the only non-case expense on this project) to make the two front-panel USB-A ports work. Not the front panel USB-C port, but oh well.
Speaking of the ancient mobo (it’s an Intel D201GLY, from the mid-2000s) and this being a test lab PC for now, the OS is OpenBSD, which runs fine. Surprisingly, neither two 2015-era Linuxes nor some very-latest Linuxes (Kali, Rocky) were able to boot on it.
One thing I disliked was the packaging. Large pieces of cardboard had large amounts of foam plastic tightly bonded to them, making recycling of the cardboard difficult if not impossible. A light tack would work as well (since everything’s bounded by the heavy cardboard box) and enable easy separation. I fear that will in part compromise the environmental savings from shipping the case as a flatpack.
There is an inch or so of space behind the base that the motherboard mounts on. This is a good place to run cables, and you can even mount a hard disk in that space. As a result, the case is an inch wider than many PC cases I’ve seen; it comes in at just over 9"/23cm wide. But it’s also an inch lower in height.
And since this is Cooler Master, there is a large chassis fan included (at left in photo), which is plenty for a test setup but for gaming you’d obviously want more cooling, and some GPU, both of which are supported. There’s also a swing-out bracket for mounting a cooling radiator (or whatever); it’s shown in the first photo above but I’m not using it at present.
Overall a fun build with a good-looking, flexible skin on the case. And a different look than the “plain black and glass with RGB LEDs all over” approach that many case makers provide. Plus, the attachments can keep your 3D printer busy for hours. Of course, you can use the PC in this case to design new attachments for your case!
Disclaimer: As per usual policy, I bought this unit and did not receive any special treatment or discount.
Shopping: You can buy this unit direct from the vendor at https://store.coolermaster.com/products/qube-500-flatpack-macaron-edition or via resellers such as Amazon.
