Inside
At first glance you don’t really spot the differences between the Scout 2 and the original when you stand back and look inside. This is mostly due to the all blacked out design. If you look closely you will notice that we now only have three 5.25 inch drive bays compared to the originals five. This shows that people are moving away from disc drives and more to more hard drive storage space.
Inside you can see the rear 120mm red LED fan on the back over the rear I/O panel. Up top there are two 120mm fan mounting locations that you can put to use to help push hot air out if you have cooling issues in the future. You can also see the CPU back plate access panel to make putting a back panel on your motherboard later on if you decide to change things up.
I mentioned it before but the 5.25 inch drive bays went down to three from a total of five previously. I personally think this is a great thing as a lot of people don’t even run DVD drives anymore and those that do are only running one. Three is more than enough to give you room for a DVD or BluRay drive along with any fan controller or other devices that you might want to use. Just like the last time Cooler Master also included their easy to use locking system that only requires you to flip the switch from unlocked to lock to secure everything.
Down on the bottom of the case you have more than enough room for even the largest power supplies. In fact the 1100 watt that we test with is the longest one we have in the office. Below the power supply you can see the filtered intake that I mentioned earlier. You can also see all of the cases cabling for the fans, USB 2 and 3, and front panel audio. As you can see they went completely black. This is notable because we have had a few other blacked out cases in that still end up with that bright blue USB cable. Cooler Master made a point to make sure every single cable would be hidden perfectly.
Because of the internal changes, the Scout 2 has a whopping 7 internal hard drive mounting locations. Five of those seven are in the top section directly to the right of the PCI slots. This section is completely removable if you feel you need more room for your video cards or if you want better airflow. You also have the two permanent locations directly below to use as well. I should point out that at 11.3 inches the scout will just barely fit the GTX 690 but you would need to remove the cage for the HD 6990. Those are the two longest cards on the market right now though meaning everything else will fit without any issues at all. It should also be mentioned that not only do you get the hard drive sliders for 3.5 inch drives you also get a 2.5 inch adapter tray to fit your SSD in as well.
Not everything important inside of a computer case goes on in the front section. It just gets all of the credit. In order to have a good looking PC it is very important that you be able to have proper wire management. As you can see they did a good job including grommeted holes to tuck the cables through, but it’s also important to have room out back to hide them. In the case of the Scout 2 Cooler Master did a great job at this. As you can see you have 7/8’s of an inch space between the motherboard tray and the bottom edge of the case. This doesn’t even count that the side panel slightly bends out, because of that I was very impressed with the room you have to work with in the back of the Scout 2.
You also have access to all of the hard drives from the back. This means you won’t have any of the SATA cables or power cables cluttering things up in the front section as well. Between all of the room, the included zip ties, and the zip tie strapping locations there isn’t any reason why you should have messy cabling this time around.
