Cooler Master MasterBox TD500 Mesh : Performance Overview

Cooler Master needs no introduction when it comes to quality PC Building Components like PSU, Chassis, Fans, AIO Liquid Cooler, Air Cooler and much more. Cooler Master has a wide variety of cases in their portfolio, right from entry level budget cases to top of the line flagship Full Towers.

In today’s age of high core count CPUs and their increasing Heat output which when paired with high end GPUs from Nvidia or AMD, poses a serious problem of getting all that heat out of the chassis quickly and efficiently.

Although Tempered Glass looks aesthetically pleasing, it poses some practical challenges in terms of ventilation. Having Side Panel as Tempered Glass is fine but when you slap it in the front, top and wherever possible, it causes blockage because glass obviously doesn’t have holes or vents to allow air to move freely.

Cooler Master has taken the tried and tested design of Front mesh for this particular Case, but added a design/pattern to it to make it look,let’s say, less boring.

Let’s take a look at Cooler Master’s latest, TD500 Mesh White -

The TD500 Mesh is available in 2 colors, White and Black. Some unique features worth noticing are,

• Polygonal Mesh

• Crystalline Tempered Glass

• Triple ARGB Fans

• Dual 360mm Radiator Support

• Versatile Cooling Options

• Room For Upgrades

Standard Specifications:

Let’s move on to the actual testing with a proper PC Build and monitor the performance and analyse accordingly. Test System Specifications:

• AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Processor

• Asrock B450 Steel Legend Motherboard

• Teamgroup T-Force Nighthawk 3600MHz 8GBx2 Memory

• Galax Gamer Triple Fan Geforce RTX 2070 Super 8GB Graphics Card

• Cooler Master Masterliquid ML360R 360mm AIO Liquid Cooler

• Cooler Master MasterBox TD500 Mesh White Chassis

• Cooler Master MWE Bronze 650W PSU

• Teamgroup 240GB SATA SSD

Front Fans act as intakes whereas the top 3 fans and the rear fan act as exhaust.

White chassis makes for the perfect canvas. With ARGB lighting, it does look very pretty

The front mesh does remind you of the Fractal Design Meshify C. The resemblance is too obvious to not note.

There is ample space inside to fit huge GPUs, 360mm Rads, AIO, Fans etc.

If you are planning to do custom water cooling with 2 x 360mm radiators, then you might have to use a slim 360mm radiator up top. Maybe you can get away with 45mm but 60mm would be a tight fit. Although there is an offset for radiator spacing, it would not foul with RAM and stuff but still it is going to be very tight with very less space to play with.

Although Cooler Master says supports 2 x 360mm Radiators, the front is a no brainer but the top one is going to be a tight fit with fans included.

If you are planning to do custom water cooling with 2 x 360mm radiators, then you might have to use a slim 360mm radiator up top. Maybe you can get away with 45mm but 60mm would be a tight fit. Although there is an offset for radiator spacing, it would not foul with RAM and stuff but still it is going to be very tight with very less space to play with.

Lot of Hooks for cable management. Helps a lot when routing tons of cables especially in RGB/ARGB builds.

See how the Radiator placement is offset from the Motherboard tray, this is to allow thicker radiators with fans to be installed without interfering with tall Heatsink RAM.

Simple and minimalistic approach for the buttons,USB ports and Headphone/Mic Jacks.

Fine mesh with cuts and angles looks slick and cool

Some shots in the Dark to accentuate the beautiful ARGB Lighting inside!

Testing & Benchmark Results:

Temperatures at idle.

AIDA64 Stress Test run for 30 Mins. Test with AVX Workload was run, this adds more heat load.

Geekbench 5 Pro is the latest iteration of Geekbench which is a popular benchmark to analyse overall system performance.

Superposition is a new age synthetic benchmark to stress the GPU. Stress test was run for 30 Mins. The GPU was set Stock Fan Curve and reported max GPU temperature of 67 Degrees.

Observation & Analysis:

• The case offers excellent ventilation thanks to the full front mesh.

• Support for not 1 but 2 360mm radiators is an added bonus

• 3 x 120mm ARGB Fans are bundled with the case.

• There is enough space to run the front AIO radiator in Push-Pull config for improved cooling performance.

• Top Radiator offset placement will help in accommodating thicker radiators and also allow space for routing cables.

• As can be seen, we chose the 3800X CPU and mated it with a ML360 AIO Liquid Cooler. During the stress tests, it worked happily at almost 4.2GHz on all cores and that is with AVX Work Load. What this means is that the front mesh allows unrestricted air flow from outside on to the radiator which helps in taking away heat from the radiator efficiently. This means, excellent cooling performance for the AIO cooler leading to higher Boost clocks. Keep in mind that AVX Work Load is more taxing on the CPU and for scenarios where there is no AVX Work Load involved, you can expect higher boost clocks.

• For GPU workload we used the latest GeForce RTX 2070 Super from Galax. Superposition has multiple settings like resolutions, level of details, etc. to add complexity to the test load to simulate different work load scenarios. We ran a stress test at 1080p resolution and high level of detail for 30 mins and the GPU did not cross 70c at all. It is completely normal for GPUs to cross 70c under heavy load irrespective of the size of their cooler or the number of fans they have.

• Overall this is a very good chassis with refreshing looks, functional design, reasonable price point and very good thermal performance. There honestly isn’t much to fault with. Good job Cooler Master!