Installation

Coolermaster equipped the CM 690 with plenty of features to make installation easy and painless. The only time you’ll need a screw driver is for power supply, motherboard or 5.25” device installation.

Let’s start with the 5.25” bays which are part plug and play, part old fashion, in order to get access to these bays you need to remove the front panel of the case, with a bit of “pull” effort it comes loose. The front panel is made from hard plastic, with metal grill inserts for the front fan filter and each individual 5.25” bay cover.



Each cover can be removed/installed easily by pushing the two clips which hold them in place outwards. The covers have a cloth inside to prevent dust from coming inside the case.



Coolermaster had to cut costs somewhere, here you can see the steel frame where you need to remove the metal cover for the bay you which too use.



You flip the plastic cover at the side upwards, slide in the optical drive, align it with the mounting holes, replace the cover and move the small slider to lock it into place. For a total secure fit you can put in screws at the other side.



The hard drive installation can be totally tool less, there are a total of 5 racks available to install HDD in:



Each rack features 4 soft rubber inserts with pin that match up with mounting holes on the HDD:



Optionally you can secure the drive with 2 screws (one at each side) but this is not really necessary if you don’t plan to move the case around a lot:



Once you slide the HDD back into the case you have access to the SATA/IDE and Power connection from the other side; while a 90° sata cable is certainly preferred, there was enough room left to use a normal one:



Motherboard installation was quick and easy, we had to remove on of the plastic cable guiders as we had a PATA connector at the side of the board;



Video, sound, network card are all installed in a blitz with this nifty clip system; we’ve seen similar ones before, but nothing as solid as these:



Even a dual slot 8800 GTX video card provided no challenge:



The power supply can be installed first or last, no preference, as there is enough room to navigate around inside. The PSU rests on small cushions to reduce vibration noise:



While we used a rather small 600W PSU we’ve read reports of people using longer power supplies which required them to remove the 140mm fan holder which sits at the bottom.

With everything installed, it’s time for stress testing ->