Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935 Case Review

Hardware enthusiasts are very passionate about their systems and go to great lengths to find the perfect case for their build.  As you can imagine building a system using fans and heatsinks is rather straight forward and doesn’t take up a ton of space or time.  However, when moving into DIY watercooling you need to consider the placement of your components since a typical enthusiast build may encompass a multitude of radiators and to maximize efficiency you need to make sure they can breathe well.

The Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935 accomplishes this by giving you a secondary mini chassis that not only thermally separates your radiator but can be positioned either above or below the main chassis.  Conceptually what the HAF Stacker provides is not new.  For instance Lian Li did something similar when they placed hard drives under the main chassis in a separate compartment.  OEM builders like CyberpowerPC and Digital Storm both offer cases with separate compartments and use them in special “one off” customer systems.  Even the Corsair 900D offers compartmental space for drives and watercooling that is separate from the main case.  When you compare the HAF Stacker to any of these options you can see what the designers were after but took things one step further and allowed the customer to determine the placement of the secondary node.

Along the same lines the customer also has the ability to daisy chain nodes to build larger cases and offer something that you may never find short of building the case yourself.

Cooling options are exceptional out of box despite the lack of included fans.  As we mentioned before this case is designed for watercooling and will fit a multitude of radiator options from a single 120mm up to a dual 360mm radiator when placed in the HAF 915.  The 915 chassis is equipped to support a variety of situations from housing for triple fan radiators to holding a fully independent Mini-ITX system.  The happy medium would be external storage assuming that you need more than 13 drives in a single system.

As with any case there are always things you can improve and when thinking of modding options there isn’t much that needs to be done that hasn’t already been accommodated.  For instance the 915 already features vented side panels which can be opened up when the radiators are installed.  Access between the case nodes is done with a few select openings.  While these appear to be small they should be enough for most any build.  The side window is quite large and has already been shaded so short of replacing the panel completely there isn’t much else to do.

Despite all the things we like about the HAF Stacker the question we keep coming back to is “why?”  Yes, building a modular case is extremely cool but once they are locked in place that is it.  Yes it does add a special style but, for the effort you could get a different case and have cleaner lines with less height.  Maybe the real benefit isn’t in building the dual case 935 and rests in the hands of builders who dare to go bigger or buy the chassis system to run dual systems.  We may never know and it’s up to you to decide.

Modular Design
Change and Expand Stacks
Eight Expansion Slots
Dual 360mm Radiator Support
Simple Case Layout
Lots of Fan Locations
Large Side Window

Only comes with two fans
Stacks lose they novelty value once assembled
Dead space between modules