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Conclusion
I have a lot of mixed feelings about the Coolermaster Pi Case 40.
What I like
I think for my use-case (not using the GPIO-header) the case works very well. It has a good quality feel, is easy to work with and has good performance in line with other passively cooled cases I tried. I also like that is is prepared to be used with a pi-Camera, something I haven’t been able to do with my FLIRC Raspberry Pi Heatsink Case where I instead used an USB-camera.
The price is also ok for a passively cooled case.
What I do not like
I was “lucky” to miss the Kickstarter which is why I have the case today. To many of the backers have not yet received their case and I think this reflects poorly on how Cooler Master has handled this Kickstarter, especially since I bought mine beginning december 2020. To be fair though 2020 have been crazy in the world and a lot of transport issues lately seem to be because of problems sending stuff out from the UK to other countries in the EU.
I also think the swapped GPIO-header has been poorly handled. Looking at Kickstarter updates it is clear that this was not communicated. In fact, one response a few months ago made it sound like it was a error that would be fixed. And then suddenly they changed it to “it was meant to be that way and the case is not meant to be used with a pHat”. Yes, you can use the GPIO by connecting to separate pins but that is not the same thing.
My feeling is that this was a grassroot-project in the company and that the team inside the company is small and has not received a lot of support. Now that issues pop up Cooler Master does not want to spend resources fixing it as the case is really a light weight product in their portfolio.
Final though
In the end I think this is a good case and I have no issues recommending it with the caveat that you might not want to support a company that havent handled the issues well. If you can overlook that and do not need the GPIO-header this case might be the one for you. I know I am happy with mine but probably will not buy another for my other Raspberry Pi.
