They Certainly Don’t Make ‘em Like This Anymore…

As you can no doubt see, this is a rather large box wrapped in duct tape - and this rather large box arrived on my doorstep just this morning after a couple of weeks of rather convoluted fannying about - and that’s a story that I’m going to tell you as this video unfolds. But of course, you’re probably well aware of what’s in this already, as I’m pretty sure you will have looked at the thumbnail or at least the title - so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by wasting any more of your time.

Let’s get this unboxed and see what it’s all about!

Oh yes, would you look at that!

This is a Cooler Master CM690 MkII PC case from 2011 - and as you can probably tell from this rather snazzy green branding and the rather cool case window on the side, this is part of a collaboration between Cooler Master and the GPU manufacturer Nvidia and this case was specifically aimed, if you haven’t guessed, at gamers - so there’s a focus on airflow, on cable management and in particular SLI - multiple GPU set-ups, which were quite big at the time. Now I first spotted this case in the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester a couple of years ago and I’ve had it on my eBay watch list ever since and I’m very very pleased to report that I managed to grab this for just a touch over £50.

Now we won’t talk about the shipping because shipping doesn’t count does it? But yeah, I’m also very lucky because there was a whole fiasco with the courier and eBay’s support basically told the seller that because the original courier couldn’t find his house that the correct solution would be to cancel the whole sale and relist the thing - so I was very lucky not only to grab this in the first place but also to jump on the relisted version of it.

But here we are, the CM690 MkII - a case that I have been wanting for the longest time. This is a really really nice example. It’s in fantastic condition. It’s arrived unscathed which is great - and also this is the later revision of this case which has USB 3. The original one only had USB 2 for those front ports - so yes, I am very pleased indeed to finally get my hands on this.

So let’s have a bit of a closer look around this case and see what it has to offer.

I do love a good old fashioned teardown, don’t you? And I think before we take this side panel off we should probably check out this top panel because this is quite interesting and this has a couple of features that I haven’t seen on PC cases before.

First and foremost the elephant in the room being this rather interesting panel here - and all credit to the previous owner for not losing this because if this was my case I probably would have lost that at some point.

But yeah this is a SATA port or serial ATA hard drives looks like you should be able to fit a 3.5” drive in there - or of course 2.5” - and I have no idea what the gaming use case for this is. If you work in IT I guess it’s quite useful for imaging drives and stuff. I’d certainly find it quite useful here in the studio but I’m not really sure - please do let me know down in the comments if you’ve owned a case with this feature and have used it for something useful in the past.

Moving on from that - of course we have the bog standard PC case stuff: we’ve got the reset button, we’ve got the power button, we’ve got 4 USB ports here so that’s 2 USB 2 ports and 2 of those “Super Speed” USB 3 ports which would have been quite a big deal at the time - and I guess the reason they mixed the port types is because the motherboards of the time didn’t support a large number of USB 3 ports so to be able to offer lots of ports on the case makes sense to chuck a couple of USB 2 ports in there as well. We’ve got the 3.5mm front audio connectors here so we’ve got the microphone and headphones. Nothing unusual there.

We’ve got the LEDs - the power and the hard drive activity LED, again completely bog standard stuff - and we also have this button here which has what looks like a little light or maybe a fan. I think it’s a light and I think this is probably the button that turns the case lighting on and off. Not quite sure if that’s included with the case and built into it or something that we need to add ourselves - of course we’ll find out in a second when we take the side panel off.

So let’s do that now!

That’s the benefit of a standing desk as I’m sure you can see - I don’t need to mess around with the tripod and raise that up, I can just lower the desk and we can fit the whole thing in shot. How useful.

Right, is that straight? There we go!

I think this should be tool-less by the looks of it - so just a couple of screws on the back.

…try not to lose those…

That lovely green Perspex case window there - as you can see there are a few scratches and things in that but hopefully they’ll polish out relatively easily.

…and here it is!

So pretty straightforward I think - we’ve got two 3.5” drive bays here for your hard drives. How are they…

Ooh! Well that is rather nice - and they have built in 2.5” caddies as well - I don’t know if these came with the case?

I’m assuming they did because they are Cooler Master branded but that’s nice so you can put your your modern 2.5” SSDs in here which of course would have been quite the luxury in 2011 - and we’ve got bays for two of those and I guess you could take those out and just put your full size 3.5” drives in there. Looks like we have the connectors for those front panel ports on there - so we’ve got the front panel audio, front panel USB and what’s this - of course that’s your old school header for- oh that’s HD audio there so what’s that one?

…oh that’s USB okay so you’ve got USB 3 ports, USB 2 ports that makes sense and yeah this is your HD audio header. We’ve got an AC’97 header on there as well so that’s nice to see all of that supported - and one thing that you might notice is the way that the cables are all routed around the back here so they go through these rubber grommets. These are looking a little bit perished but they’re not too bad and they’re actually all routed underneath the motherboard tray as well so some really nice built-in cable management which would have been quite a high-end feature back in 2011.

Looks like we have - oh wow! So that’s instead of the drive bay screws - so for these 5.25” drive bays here - we’ve got four of those which is absolutely fantastic. So it’s got these locking things - so this is tool-less drive removal.

That is so cool, that’s such a cool mechanism.

I love the way they lock in. So I’m guessing there was probably one in the top bay here and the previous owner has had a drive installed in there - they’ve also lost the front panel as well, these rather lovely mesh covers but of course this will need an optical drive in it if I’m doing a 2011 build so that’s not a problem at all, we’ll get a - I don’t know, a Blu-Ray drive maybe?

We have at the front an enormous 140mm fan is that? Look at that bad boy, that is so cool! I’ll get a close-up shot of that so I can show it to you but yeah this clear Perspex fan that is absolutely massive and we also have some fans here on the case itself - I believe from looking at the spec that this actually came with the case. Perhaps this back one did as well? But these are 120mm fans as well - these are Cooler Master branded, as is that - that’s also Cooler Master branded is that RGB? I don’t think it is, I think that’s just a bog standard fan but yeah loads of cooling as you might expect from a gamer spec case.

We also have the mesh on the bottom for bottom fans if you want those as well and we’ve got the space for a standard power supply in here as well - of course I guess the previous owner has taken that out.

How many slots do we have? One two three four five six seven of those - and we’ve got this one across here as well, is this for…

…I actually have no idea what that’s for! There’s kind of a vertical port as well it’s probably something really obvious isn’t it people are probably shouting at me about that down in the comments - let me know I want to know what that is.

Anyway, let’s get this turned over and see if we can see what this motherboard tray looks like - this cable management that all runs behind the motherboard.

It’s all a bit modern and fancy for me, I will say.

Well that is all rather nice and tidy, isn’t it? So we’ve got some…

Hang on a second!

We’ve got the standard fan connector there and also a two pin connector coming from this top panel - so I wonder if that button actually controls the lights in this fan?

That must have built-in lighting. I bet that lights up green or something. Unfortunately, I don’t have a power supply in this system, so I can’t test that. That’ll be quite interesting to see once we get this built up. But yeah, here’s the back of the motherboard tray - as you can see, we’ve got those rubber grommets and things, all the cables coming through to the top panel connectors here. Nice and clean and tidy, all nice and black inside - and I will say, no sharp edges at all - these are all really nice kind of rolled edges, which is always nice when you’re working on a PC case. Always a good sign of a good quality case.

Yeah, I’m going to have a lot of fun with this!

So, there we have it - the Cooler Master CM690 MkII PC case from 2011, and if you can’t tell I am pleased as punch to finally get my hands on one of these cases. I’ve been after this for the longest time and this is such a lovely example as well it is a credit to its former owner - and of course I’m going to have to do this thing justice by turning it into an era-appropriate top of the range gaming PC - so at the time I had an Intel i5 2500K based system which was the top of the range of that generation of i5 CPUs so maybe I could pay homage to that, maybe build it around that, or maybe go all out and go for the i7, I’m not quite sure.

I think it’s got to be Intel because of course Intel and Nvidia that’s the classic combo - has to be Nvidia graphics cards of course in this machine, I don’t think AMD would be appropriate and speaking of GPUs I think it’s got to be an SLI setup as well because that is what this case was designed for.

Something I have zero experience with whatsoever - I’m not even sure if SLI is worth it what the benefits are but hey I can find out and I can bring you along on that journey as well and now we finally have that opportunity so wonderful wonderful stuff!

Of course this is going to be a bit of a longer running series on this channel and I’m going to need some time to do my research, work out which motherboard I need and stuff like that - if you do have any thoughts on that please do let me know down in the comments because I am far from an expert on this specific era of PC gaming.

But yeah, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss further updates on this wonderful build. That’s all I have for you for this video of course I have to say a big thank you to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi and of course my YouTube channel members as well they get videos a little bit early and also ad-free and they also help to fund cool projects like this - and you know stuff that we get to be entertained by and learn all about on the channel so thank you ever so much to you but that’s all I have for you for this video so thank you for watching and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.