First Look: Cooler Master’s MasterHUB Is an Awesome Snap-Together Power Tool for Creators
Designed for digital creators and streamers, the nifty MasterHUB riffs on Elgato’s Stream Decks. You can design your own desktop-peripheral power tool with swappable dials, sliders, shortcut-key panels, and touch screens.
By John Burek
TAIPEI—Cooler Master, the day before Computex 2023’s official start, opened its new, ultramodern Taiwan headquarters to invited international press and demoed the MasterHUB, a nifty-looking modular peripheral designed for gamers, streamers, and content creators. Building on the signature feature of competitor Corsair/Elgato’s Stream Decks—a grid of programmable hotkeys with integrated LCDs on each key—the MasterHUB does it one better. Or, you might say, it could do it several times better, depending on which and how many of its special input modules you install.
The MasterHUB comprises a series of modules that can be swapped around and laid out in a huge variety of configurations. At the center of it all is a baseboard peppered with pogo-pin contacts, like so…
MasterHub modules snap magnetically onto the board, and the board, dubbed FlexBase, plugs into your PC via USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 (allowing for DisplayPort over USB connectivity for the screen modules). You can drop on modules for different-size touch screens, knob tri-clusters, or a single scrubbing-type dial with a programmable LCD in the center. Also available will be a thin scroll-bar module, a slider module, and more. In essence, you can assemble an array of modules that suits your specific use case, placed in the positions you find best. Plus, Cooler Master will eventually offer multiple “baseboard” sizes.
How does this translate in practice? A streamer, for example, might want one of the Stream Deck-style button-shortcut modules, along with a fader panel. In contrast, a video editor might prefer the scroll bar and the scrubbing dial. The modules take up different footprints on the baseboard, so you’ll need to plan accordingly, depending on the available spaces on the board and what they can fit at one time.
Cooler Master intends to offer three different packages of modules and baseboard for three different usage cases: a Streamer Kit, a Video Editor Kit, and a Photo Editor Kit. These packages include modules that the company deems an appropriate mix of MasterHUB modules for the specific user profile. (The Streamer Kit, for example, includes the base, the 15-key button panel, the five-slider module, and the scroll wheels strip.) Additional modules will be sold, meanwhile, direct from Cooler Master, in the event a buyer wants one of the modules that’s outside the pre-baked bundle they get.
Especially striking is the three-by-five button panel, which has individual IPS screens on each key; you can customize the key images to help you remember which key does what. Different programs will require patches or plugins installed to the MasterHUB to allow you to create shortcuts and program functions to the key, slider, dial, or other control in question. And there, of course, will be the make-or-break for the MasterHUB: how well it plays with key software packages, and how easy it is to program commands.
The company also demonstrated a new software control scheme that will govern MasterHUB. Much more than just a face for MasterHUB alone, the new MasterControl is partly system-monitoring software, partly a control UI for all Cooler Master hardware you may have in your PC.
The user interface looks clean, and is segmented logically according to theme and product type. Looking at competitor “ecosystem” UIs such as Razer Synapse or Corsair’s iCUE, given how many categories of gear Cooler Master has in the market, it only makes sense for the UI to be unified across the hardware.
We got a brief look at the nuts and bolts of MasterControl, and came away guardedly optimistic. This new software will eventually take the place, as well, of existing Cooler Master control schemes, and a new sign-on account (the Master ID) will tie together your settings, the record of Cooler Master gear you own, and the ability to move your accumulated data to a new system.
Expect the MasterHUB bundles to launch near the end of this year. Pricing was not yet announced.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
