Corsair Obsidian 350D Case Review
by Dustin Sklavos on April 25, 2013 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- MicroATX
Noise and Thermal Testing
If the noise and thermal testing bordered on being academic for the Fractal Design Define Mini, it's even more out of place with the Corsair Obsidian 350D. The Define Mini lends itself well to liquid cooling, but the 350D was outright designed for it, and that substantially reduces the importance of air cooling performance. As a result, our conventional testing isn't just beneath the 350D's pay grade, it's not even at the same place of business.
With all that said, though, there are still a few things to learn here. Remember that the 350D starts at $99, making it an affordable enough starting point for the end user who just wants a classy, easy-to-build chassis.
Ambient temperature during testing was around 22C.
Thermally the Obsidian 350D puts in a fairly healthy performance. Competitive without being spectacular, it mostly suffers from being an offshoot of the basic ATX case design. Air cooling thermals have never been Corsair's strong suit, but they've always been workable, and the 350D continues that trend.
Because the 350D is able to keep thermals reasonably low, noise stays low as well. The vanilla testbed is nowhere near stressful enough to really work the 350D.
When you add even a modest dedicated graphics card, Corsair starts playing that old familiar song. The plastic "cage" used for the SSD doesn't seem to be particularly detrimental to its temperatures, but even the direct airflow from the front fan onto the GTS 450 Eco isn't really adequate. CPU thermals remain solid, though.
Idle noise continues to be a non-issue. Load noise isn't terrible, but it's not very impressive, either. While Fractal Design's case has a lot of acoustic padding and is built with heavy steel to help insulate noise, the 350D has no such allowances, and noise becomes entirely dependent on the efficiency of the cooling system.
Adding a more robust video card only reinforces what we've already learned. CPU cooling performance is above average, but GPU cooling performance continues to be middling. These cards are using open air coolers that will tax the case's cooling system, and the middling stock cooling (one 140mm intake and one 120mm exhaust in their typical ATX locations) doesn't do the 350D any favors.
Noise levels are reasonable. The cooler on our GTX 560 Ti can be pretty rough on any enclosure (and is outright hostile when the 560 is overclocked), but at least the 350D isn't getting overwhelmed.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
65 Comments
View All Comments
ushlak.morante - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Not a bad little case, could be a little smaller for me personally but depends on what you are looking for. I do still think that the TJ-08E manages to do pretty much the same job in a smaller space although it could do with a few of the updates that Corsair has used to bring it more up to date.ezridah - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Nice looking case and nice review. It would be nice to see you review the Fractal Design Arc Mini now. And they also came out with the Arc Midi R2 recently.529th - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
what the ffffffff is in the reflection of the first pic!? LOLtnerb - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Are you going to be doing a review of the HAF XB anytime soon? Definitely interested in a CM open-air approach to microATX that's also portable.Comdrpopnfresh - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
does it come with the bowl of noodles?Jambe - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
It's 41.6 liters? There are dozens of full-ATX mid-towers smaller than that!I would not call this "small". Perhaps in comparison to the absolute largest cases available, but those are outliers (and the vast majority of DIYers don't need that space, anyway).
Rosewill's Line-M mATX case (at 27 liters) might constitute "small" but certainly not anything over 40! Yowza.
Anyway, it certainly seems to be a nice case, and the review and photos were thorough as usual.
Jackie60 - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
If Anandtech are doing cookery reviews could I please see the rating for the hot and sour soup.HisDivineOrder - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
It's telling in your recounting of past Corsair cases you completely forgot the Obsidian 550D.I think when I came into this review I expected the 350D to be the 550D except smaller, so imagine my surprise when it was a 650D but smaller. You state it can be used with the H110, but since you did not test it, I wonder if this is true. Corsair states outright that the H110 will not work with the 550D even though it has the 140mm fans at the top (due mostly to the way motherboard heatsinks are often fitted and where the power cables go in at the top). If only you did more than test air cooling...
I also find it interesting you made allowances for this case to be a "water-cooling focused case" and forgave middling air cooling, but with the 550D where there are tons of ATX options for other cases by Corsair if you want air cooling you demanded "great" air-cooling or bust. Curious. Those priorities seem backwards to me.
I can't help thinking you'd be doing us all a big favor in using this case the way it was intended to be used and throwing a microATX motherboard with two GPU's into this case and giving us a real performance test of its cooling rather than a rather fringe case of someone using a mITX instead.
And I look forward to the now inevitable Obsidian 150D mITX case that should come any month now. At least then your mITX motherboard will FINALLY make sense to me when you use it.
DanNeely - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
IIRC the most recent hardware updates left AT with an mITX board and a full ATX board for case testing.LoneWolf15 - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
Beautiful. My only wish is for one more 5.25" (or a 3.5") external bay, which could be done easily. I'd switch from my Corsair 650D in a heartbeat, but I have a DVD-RW, a 5.25" Lamptron fan controller, and a 3.5" multi-memory card reader, and I'd like to keep all three.