Specifications, Availability and Pricing

Cooler Master brings the USP 100 to the table built from mostly steel with a plastic and mesh front bezel. Stepping away from all black, the USP 100 comes with all the mesh painted red in the front bezel and also has two red vents at the bottom. The chassis will house both mATX and ATX motherboards inside of this nineteen by twenty inch box. Behind the front bezel there are four bays that have removable mesh panels to allow for optical devices. Hidden underneath you will find room for up to six hard drives and they even made room for a floppy drive. In the rear the USP 100 offers seven expansion slots to allow for Crossfire or SLI and still have room for a NIC or sound card.

Cooling inside this chassis, well, it leaves a little to be desired, but costs get cut somewhere and here is where in the USP 100. Cooler Master does ship the chassis with a 120mm red LED fan to act as the intake, behind the front bezel. From there it is up to you. Options for placement are one in the bottom, one in the rear, and one in the door panel. Something I do like about the way it is designed, though; what fans can fit. Each of the three optional positions for fans will allow for 80mm, 90mm, and 120mm fans to all be mounted. This means you may be able to use a couple fans you have lying around, and you may not need to incur more cost in the overall price to get superior airflow.

The power supply included is a Cooler Master eXtreme Power RS550. This PSU offers two +12V rails at 16 amps and roughly 70% efficiency overall. Connectivity is well covered with the typical 24-pin and 8-pin power leads as well as more for the components. Two separate lines, both with three SATA power connections, a 4-pin Molex line with three connections, and two 6+2-pin GPU power lines wrap up the rest. While the power and amperage are a bit limited, it should power anything in Crossfire or SLI that only has one 6-pin per card. I plan to run my trusty GTS 250 off of it and it requires both leads, so no SLI for me this time around.

Google shows me that this chassis shouldn't be hard to find at all. Over ten pages of sales hits tell me that it's widely available and the pricing is varied. On the high end, I saw the USP 100 with the power supply listing for right around $150, and if you pay that you didn't shop that hard. Way lower on the price spectrum you will find The Cooler Master USP 100 listing at Newegg for $89.99. Now, of course there is shipping, and that does take the total price to just over that $100 mark. Shopping frugally and possibly waiting, free shipping may happen from Newegg, as they seem to revolve what cases do and don't get free shipping that day or week. Even so, for a chassis with a power supply included, this just may be the answer to house a budget gamer or LAN box.