Cooler Master TD500 Max Review (2024)

Seldom do we see PC cases that come with a power supply installed, and when you do, it’s almost always a proprietary design—usually, a funky compact size. Ditto for a liquid cooler coming installed in the case. Rarer still is getting both in one, which lends the $399.99 Cooler Master TD500 Max case/power/cooler combo a true touch of the unique. Also unusual: The case has built-in sockets for power “extension cables” that connect the motherboard and GPU to the motherboard-tray portion of the case, easing cable routing to an extent.

Really, though, the TD500 Max is all about the parts math. The pre-installed GX III Gold 850W power supply runs about $170 by itself; you also get an oversize version of the company’s $150 MasterLiquid 360 Atmos closed-loop CPU liquid cooler. Those who can justify the power supply will note that the math leaves them paying only $80 for the case. (And those who really want this bigged-up version of the ML360 Atmos? This is the only way to get one.) The value proposition hinges on whether you are after equivalent cooler and PSU parts in the first place. If you are, though, this bundle is a fine value and the fast way to settle a third or more of your PC build’s part selection in one stroke.

Design: Several Shades Of Grey

Only a change of color visually differentiates today’s TD500 Max package from the TD500 Mesh enclosure that launched two years ago. Cooler Master calls the shade of gray “Gun Metal,” and rather than debate the definition of that shade, we’ll point out that it appears darker in person than in our photos. (A look at Cooler Master’s web page seems to indicate that the company also had trouble representing its true hue.) Grooves molded into the glass and a three-dimensional fan grille that fills the center of the slope-sided face panel are the most visually interesting parts of its basic mid-tower shape.

Front-panel connectors angle upward near the top of the case, and include two Type-A and one Type-C USB 3 ports and a single headphone/microphone combo jack. This is also where you’ll find the backlit power and ARGB-pattern buttons, plus a pinhole through which a hard drive activity LED shines.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A top-panel radiator mount sits unoccupied behind those upper front-panel ports. It can hold radiator and fan combos up to 418mm in length and 57mm thick, and it provides around 41mm of horizontal offset from the motherboard standoffs to allow coolers thicker than 57mm to hang slightly below the top of the motherboard. How well that works depends on the thickness of onboard items and their distance from the motherboard’s upper edge.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

At the back of the TD500 Max are a 120mm exhaust fan mounted on a height-adjustment slot that’s about an inch high. Below it are seven screwed-in expansion slot covers on a bridgeless slot panel, and the back of the included 850-watt power supply. The lack of bridges to divide each slot space allows certain vertical-graphics-card mounts to be fitted in place of those expansion-slot covers.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A slide-out panel beneath the power supply is the TD500 Max’s only serviceable dust filter, though holes in the front panel’s mesh are probably small enough to trap dust for as long as the user can stand looking at it collect.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Even though the rear fan’s appearance is a close match to the model used on Cooler Master’s original Atmos 360 cooler, the company used a different design for the thicker radiator of its Atmos 360 Max. This photo also shows the back of the motherboard tray, with its large access hole for installing a CPU cooler support plate and eight screw points for two 2.5-inch drives.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Cooler Master’s now-familiar C2164 (OEM) hub resides near the top front corner of the motherboard tray’s back surface, spreading PWM and ARGB signals from a single fan header and an ARGB header on the motherboard to four fan motors and up to five ARGB devices. Most of those headers are occupied by the motor and ARGB lighting of the three front and one rear fan. But note that the three front fans have ARGB pass-through connectors that, when added to the open ARGB header on the C2164 hub, can transmit ARGB signals to four additional ARGB devices.

If you disconnect the hub’s ARGB input cable from the motherboard (or don’t connect it in the first place), that enables the integrated ARGB controller to kick in. It features 14 lighting patterns. You can turn off the lighting altogether by holding the case’s ARGB selector button for two to three seconds, but only when the onboard controller is enabled.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Under the bottom edge of the motherboard tray, the power-supply tunnel hides an additional drive cage that holds two 3.5-inch drives using clip-on rails. The top of the cage supports a third drive, but in 2.5-inch form factor, using the same type of mounting hardware as the other two 2.5-inch drive mounts.

The included power supply, the GX III 850 Gold mentioned up top, is (as the name implies) 80Plus Gold efficiency rated and rated for 850W. A modular design that assumes 160mm of the 210mm open space that we measured, its sockets are one cable short of a full set.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

It’s easier to see with the other side open the few things that differentiate the TD500 Max from the model on which its based, including a plastic plug over the power supply logo’s view port and the factory-installed radiator.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The square foam clamshell you can see above hides the CPU cooler’s head seen below. It contains a CPU water block, a pump, ARGB lighting, and an Atmos-branded decorative cover. The cooler head is connected through two coolant lines, a fan power lead (to power the pump), and an ARGB lead (to power the head’s decorative lighting).

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The “Max” version of the radiator in this bundled AIO cooler differs from the original Atmos 360 cooler by being 11mm thicker, at 38mm. And the Max case differs from the original by having cable leads attached and pre-routed to the sockets mentioned earlier: Two EPS12V and one 24-pin ATX sockets are visible near the top of the motherboard tray.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Lower on the motherboard tray is a third power connector featuring a PCIe 12V extension. (Just one, mind you, not two.) The 12VHPWR lead, servicing late-model Nvidia cards, doesn’t have such an extension jack on the case, but is factory-installed to simplify card installation for those who need it.

Removing the plastic plug that covers the side of the power supply bay exposes a factory-inserted foam block that holds installation hardware, including a dozen threaded pins for 2.5-inch drive installation, 13 #6-32 screws for motherboard and “other” (unspecified), and a Phillips #2-to-hex adapter socket for moving around the nine included standoffs. It's a clever way to present the case screws in an organized fashion, not just in baggies.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Building With the TD500 Max

In addition to the screws noted above, the TD500 Max includes a host of build accessories. These include rails for two 3.5-inch hard drives, grommets to keep the 2.5-inch drives in place via friction mounting, zip-style cable ties, power-supply extension and AC-input cables, and two hose clips to help keep the coolant hoses looking orderly. You also get a three-way PWM fan splitter cable, a dual-pattern Intel (LGA 1200, 1700, and earlier) socket support plate, a tube of thermal paste, screws for attaching CPU adapter brackets to the water block, three sets of standoffs for spacing the included water-block brackets at the correct height over various CPUs, AMD- and Intel-pattern water-block brackets, and a set of nuts to hold the water-block brackets tight against standoffs.

So, about those internal power extension cables. They include 24-pin ATX/EPS, a splitable 8-pin/4-pin EPS12V/ATX12V cable, a standard eight-pin EPS12V, and a 6+2 pin PCIe. Also, the above-mentioned standoffs include AMD sockets AM3 through AM5, as well as Intel LGA 1155 through 1700.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Once our hardware is installed, cables including the fan/ARGB hub’s PWM fan and ARGB inputs, a power button and indicator LED group, a front-panel audio jack header, a USB 3.2 Gen 1, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 will connect our motherboard to the case.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

We’ve been throwing out hints to this point, and now we’re just going to say it: The empty cable socket in the TD500 Max’s power supply body is designed for a second 6+2 pin PCIe cable that the company did not include. Perhaps Cooler Master missed it because the case doesn’t have a second header of that type on the motherboard tray, and perhaps cable crowding drove the decision not to leave it hanging out the way the designers did with the 12VHPWR cable, but regardless, the included cables will not power the GeForce RTX 2070 of our recently retired case testing kit, or any cards that need three 6+2 connectors, which includes many high-end Radeon graphics cards. Because the 12VHPWR cable is present, we feel entirely fortunate that we chose a GeForce card that uses it for our 2024 case testing configuration. We’ll reiterate that config here...

Since the TD500 Max includes a cooler, our first tasks were to remove the regular test cooler from our test board, screw our test motherboard to the case’s standoffs, and install the case’s MasterLiquid 360 Atmos Max water block over our test CPU. The case kit’s LGA 1700 standoffs are screwed through our motherboard’s CPU cooler mounting holes to the case kit’s CPU socket support plate, and will later be connected to the water block’s brackets as illustrated.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Cooler Master uses a thick sticker to guide users on the amount of thermal paste to use: Simply apply the paste within the open dots and scrape it smooth with a straight edge (such as a credit card) to leave a layer the thickness of the sticker behind (after pulling the sticker off). It’s a nifty, neatening approach. Cooler Master has been using this method for at least as long as its Atmos cooler series has been around.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The screw holes at the sides of the water block above are used to secure water-block brackets such as the one seen two photos above. Nuts then top the brackets, as shown below.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

What comes next is the case looking splendid in its RGB glory, without a lot of the hassle of AIO-cooler and PSU mounting.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The downside is that testing a case with a much larger CPU cooler like this one would mean that it would at least have a competitive advantage in CPU temperature. To keep things fair, we also tested the case with the same smaller cooler that was used to test the other cases in today’s performance charts. And yes, that does mean that our second test configuration used the case’s giant CPU cooler as nothing more than a set of intake fans.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Testing the Cooler Master TD500 Max

While the TD500 Max reached only mid-pack CPU cooling performance when using the same cooler as the compared cases, our CPU’s temperature plummeted when using its included Atmos Max 360mm cooler. Our cooler did a better job of cooling the motherboard’s voltage regulator (probably due to proximity), and its added exhaust airflow also helps with GPU cooling.

It seems like just days ago that we were calling the Cooler Master MasterBox 600 our noisiest test case, but the TD500 Max’s maximized front fans pushed it a decibel or two beyond that. To be fair, our graphics card makes the noise that stands out most from all the various moving parts, and some cases seem to be better than others at reflecting its noise away from our microphone.

Verdict: A Bargain If You Need All Three Parts

The question is whether the $400 spent for the TD500 Max represents a bargain, in light of its $170 power supply and $150-plus CPU cooler. That’s a lot to calculate, as a direct cost translation relies on the prices for both the power supply and CPU cooler to be reasonable. We could be convinced that the power supply should be a bit cheaper, especially in light of its 6+2 cable limitation for high-end cards.

If we treat the power supply as a $150 value and the cooler as $150, the TD500 Max’s case becomes a $100 portion of the combo. That seems reasonable, but not exceptional given mild corner-cuts such as its use of the front panel itself as a dust filter, and the lack of that second 6+2 cable.

However, if we treat the cooler as the $170 part…we’ve tested enough of them to know that the results seen here are quite good. To the point: The MasterLiquid 360 Atmos Max cooler is among the best closed-loop coolers of its size, and at this time it’s only available with this package. If you need the kind of heavy-duty cooling it brings for an Intel Core i7 or i9 CPU, or an AMD Ryzen 9, the Atmos Max part of the package definitely carries its weight for the money. It’s all about whether the other two parts hold up their end of the deal in your build calculations. If they do, this is a fine combo. If not, you're better off choosing your build components the old-fashioned way: piece by piece.