Elevating Your Digital Domain: The MasterHUB Unveiled

If you’ve tired of the restrictions of preset buttons on your streaming and gaming consoles and want to make the most of the new social sharing opportunities offered by devices such as Stream Deck, you’ll get the latest and arguably, the best this summer. Cooler Master’s MasterHUB is a modular control panel that can do almost everything you need it to, and with a much-less-restricted design than its rivals. Here’s what the MasterHUB is best for, and why it’s set to take on the Stream Deck with its cooler and more custom features.

A Modular Marvel in Technology

The Foundation: Flexbase

This Flexbase is the starting point of the MasterHUB, and you can snap on different modules of varying size and functionality – a magnetic/pogo-pin system – to it. Connected to your PC through the Thunderbolt (USB-C) port, it offers enough bandwidth for any creative or control task.

Building Blocks: MasterHUB Modules

It is the modules, after all, that really make the MasterHUB tick: tiny attachments to the central hub that can enhance your audio-visual experience, or simply tweak your digital control interface. Highlights include:

• Touch Display: Elevate your monitoring or control setup with an 8-inch secondary touch screen.
• Dual Scrolling Wheels: Experience intuitive control reminiscent of high-end media keyboards.
• Dial Modules: Both standard and encoder types offer nuanced control, perfect for creatives.
• 15-Key Display Module: customise the functionality of each of the 15 keys – one display on each.
• Slider Module: Master your sound levels with precision using five sliders.
• Compact Display Modules: Optimize your space with these versatile, smaller display units.

Power at Your Fingertips: Configuration and Software

And it’s not just the hardware; Cooler Master’s offering is a true ecosystem. While the MasterHUB helps you configure your setup, the accompanying software doubles down as a real contender to Stream Deck, allowing you to not just configure your rig but also monitor and control a multitude of system parameters, from CPU and GPU workloads to RGB settings. Gamers are in control.

Anticipation Builds: Availability and Pricing

We don’t yet know when MasterHUB will land, or how much it will cost, but Cooler Master’s gamble is already paying off. By bringing its decades of experience in innovation into a new space, the company is poised to disrupt the established control deck. With its flexible, powerful – and not particularly beautiful – solution, MasterHUB will have wide appeal, spanning the creative community to the computer nerd.

Ahead of the Curve: Join the Revolution

For more than 25 years, Tom’s Hardware has kept PC-tinkerers on the forefront of technology with our reviews of the latest hardware. The imminent launch of the MasterHUB is just the latest in a series of next-generation tech to cross our desk, spurred by the same passion that has fuelled our writing for more than two decades.

The Status of Innovation: MasterHUB’s Role

But MasterHUB’s entrance into this market, no matter how timely, is more than just that. It’s also revolutionary, not just in terms of its modularity and the customizability it provides to users in terms of crafting their perfect control panel. It’s a bid to return status – control, personalisation, precision – back to the user, and allow them to not only work, but to do so in an elevated way, turning the digital landscape, in essence, into a pleasure dome.

The MasterHU is the first genuinely modular control deck, giving the user complete user control over his computer. The devices that will come next in digital interaction are bounded only by our imagination. We’ll have to wait ‘til this summer to find out when Cooler Master’s product will arrive. But when it does, they won’t just be launching a product. They’ll be shifting the status quo of what a control deck can be.