Corsair Carbide 300R Case Review: Corsair For the Masses
by Dustin Sklavos on June 29, 2012 2:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Corsair
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- mid-tower
- ATX
Assembling the Corsair Carbide 300R
I've routinely mentioned Corsair makes the easiest cases to assemble on the planet, and the 300R has somehow made that even easier. This assembly was one of the smoothest I've done by a long shot, although there is still at least a little bit of room for improvement.
First, the motherboard tray is practically a godsend. Corsair doesn't include any motherboard standoffs with the 300R because the tray itself has a single brass stud in the center for lining up the board and then extrusions with mounts built into them. The only flaw with this design is that it's not ideal for Micro-ATX boards, and the side of ours wound up hanging off with no support. Since that side isn't going to be particularly prone to stress I'm willing to give them a pass, though I would've liked to have seen more than a single arbitrary mounting hole in the tray for a Micro-ATX standoff (as well as maybe including one or two standoffs in the package).
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Mounting drives to the 300R was only slightly more difficult. Removing the bay shield from the top 5.25" bay was easy enough, but installing the blu-ray drive our testbed uses required applying a bit of force and shimmying it in. The toolless mechanism Corsair uses is a good one, but end users may want to take advantage of the open mounting holes to secure the drive anyhow. Meanwhile, the drive trays are the older style Corsair used, so while the pins pop into 3.5" drives easily enough, you'll have to remove one to mount 2.5" drives.
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Lining up the power supply for installation was incredibly simple, as the entire area around the power supply bay is basically molded to snugly hold it in place. Installing the GeForce GTX 560 Ti we use for testing was also just as easy; two thumbscrews secure it in place after removing the replaceable slot covers.
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On the flipside, cabling wound up being a little messier than I'd like, and that's at least partially due to the lack of rubber grommets lining the routing holes that I was crying into my beer about earlier. Another part of the problem is that the routing hole for the AUX 12V line is very narrow and requires shimmying the cable through it. It's an extremely tight fit and could stand to be widened at least a little, and I can see many users just foregoing it entirely. There's also a decent amount of space behind the motherboard tray, but I miss the routing channels in more modern designs like the Vengeance C70.
I feel like we've lost some of the clean interior assembly that's been par for the course for Corsair's cases, where they practically forced you to keep everything neat. That said, it's still extremely simple to put together a system in the Carbide 300R. As I've mentioned repeatedly in the past, though: assembly was never Corsair's problem. Let's see how their budget model handles thermals.
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sfroom - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
This case probably performed slightly better than the graphs show.Keep in mind that while ambient temperatures don't affect the temperature delta charts, they DO affect fans speed, and noise, particularly at load.
Ilias78 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
Justin, i always love your case reviews but i think that you can do a whole lot better when it comes to cable management.C2bcool - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
I agree. I just did an install in this case a week ago and it was my first build ever. I found the cable management very easy if you plan it out a bit first. I also got the grommets from the 800D and put those in the holes/cable passthroughs, they really cleaned up the look.Grommets: http://www.corsair.com/us/rubber-grommets-for-obsi...
The large ones fit perfectly.
Grok42 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
I'm tired of all the good case manufactures building good cases for the needs of 2001 and apparently not putting the necessary resources into designing what we need now. Nothing against this case specifically so feel free to replace this case with ANY well built case and I think you will find the same criticism applies. This is a result of my frustration finding a decent Mini-ITX or even Micro-ITX case for my latest build.There are THREE 5.25" bays and even worse, they are ALL externally accessible. If you're still putting CD/DVD/Blue-ray drives in your computers you should make sure you're not doing it out of habit and actually use them for more than just installing an operating system. I haven't put an optical drive in my box for five years and I considered myself a late bloomer stuck in the past. Spend $10 more on your next build and get an external drive and then put it in the closet until the next time you need to install another computer.
Other than CD/DVD/Blue-ray, I can't think of a single other externally accessible device that you could possibly buy! Why does every case on the market, including mini-ITX cases insist on putting at least one 5.25" or slimline bay externally accessible? Having three of them is just 3x more ridiculous. The author states the he is using four 5.25" bays in his current setup. I would LOVE to know what for. I'm guessing two are CD/DVD/Blue-ray drives that never get used or only rarely and the other two are internal and hold 3.5" hard drives? I can't imagine it's anything that is regularly useful or couldn't be accommodated differently without the bays. This would reduce the price of the cases a good bit as the external bays are complex to engineer well.
Now that we've established there is no need for external bays, what about internal 2.5" 3.5" and 5.25" bays? I see no need for 5.25" internal bays. I'm not aware of a single use for an internal 5.25" bay other than being converted with a bracket to 3.5". Lets agree that all internal bays should be 3.5" and 2.5" variety. How many should there be? As many as possible please. But, and this is important, make them modular! Build a rail system so that I can mount as many or as few 3.5 and 2.5 drives in any mix I want with whatever spacing I want. I know this isn't easy to design and will require a lot of expense. However, a well designed rail system could be portable and used by a manufacture across their case lines to offset the cost of designing the system.
Finally, this case has SEVEN openings for expansion slots. 90% of the market needs 2 for a discrete graphics card, 10% need four for an SLI setup. The other three to six slots can be used for what? Maybe to add thunderbolt support two years later when it's more popular? I don't think so. Instead you will purchase a new motherboard that supports it and upgrade you processor and memory to boot. Based on the price point, I assume that 99% of the customers that purchase this box will put one single or dual slot graphics card in it.
I've build dozen of full tower ATX builds in my time. I have a server next to me with 8 hard drives in it. I know there are those running triple dual slot SLI rigs. I'm just asking for one decent case for the 90% of us that want to build a modest Core i7, 16GB RAM, 2TB 3.5 HD, 120GB SSD, Nvidia 560Ti gaming rig in a small footprint. The problem is that all the case manufactures start throwing in external bays and the ability to have 6 internal hard drives in a min-ITX case and wonder why they don't sell. The few who do try and focus don't have the resources to do the necessary engineering that is needed to build a good case.
kyuu - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
I guess I'm "stuck in the past". I still buy blu-rays, import music from CDs, and purchase box copies of my games for the most part. Kindly don't assume that no one uses ODDs anymore just because you and your small circle of friends don't.JarredWalton - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
Fan bus controllers would be another potential use for the 5.25" bays, and some people (GASP!) even have double-height controllers with LCD displays showing various statistics. So, a Blu-ray drive with one of those LCD controllers gets you to three 5.25" bays. You know, something like this:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
There are also water-cooling reservoirs that fit in a 5.25" bay, card readers with USB ports, and removable drive enclosures that can all fit in external 5.25" bays. Given a lot of cases don't have externally accessible 3.5" bays, I'd say any case that wants to work for nearly any user needs a minimum of three 5.25" bays.
Your opinion is that 5.25" external bays are useless, but it's just that: an opinion. I can guarantee that if someone released a PC with only one external bay (or none), there would be an outcry from many people that have the opinion that two bays is the bare minimum. Some of that might be out of habit, but for my desktop systems I would never want to have to deal with an external optical drive every time I need to access a CD/DVD -- which is something I still do at least weekly. For $20 for a good DVDRW that stays put (external drives can slide around, get knocked to the floor by kids, etc.) it's money well spent.
jeffkro - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - link
yup, I'm eventually going to have to put a 5.25" adapter plate with usb 3.0 headers since my antec 300 only came with usb 2.0Grok42 - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - link
Come on, I never said no one needs a case like this. I said that 90% of builds don't need a case like this. Specifically the title of the review, "For the masses", prompted me to post my thoughts. I get that 10% need an internal DVD drive, mostly for games and their insistence on DRM, but a huge portion have moved over to buying their games on-line so they don't have to mess with media anymore. I paid $3 for a game I already owned so I didn't have to put a DVD in the drive when I wanted to play it anymore and this was when I still had an internal drive.jeffkro - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - link
Yup, besides movies you still need a dvd drive to install and play games. I built an NAS I temporarily had to install a dvd drive to install windows.chrnochime - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
TL:DR.And posting such a long whine here accomplish what exactly?