Corsair Graphite Series 600T: Cool and Quiet
by Dustin Sklavos on November 26, 2010 2:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- 600T
Installation and Cable Routing
I love my Antec P182, but working in that case proved to be a very special kind of hell. If you have a graphics card as long as the Radeon HD 5870 or longer, you pretty much have to remove the top drive cage, which means you're stuck using the bottom cage, which orients the drives in the worst way possible. I have small hands and it was still a nightmare to cable up and install drives. God help me when I have to replace a drive.
The 600T, on the other hand, was freakishly easy to get everything set up in. It helps to have a power supply with modular cabling (and if you're considering spending $160 on a case, you may want to go ahead and step that up too) because it allows you to do the installation in steps.
My first step was installing the motherboard. I already had the heatsink (a Xigmatek Dark Knight S1283) mounted to the board, and popping the I/O shield and then motherboard in proved reasonably easy. Corsair provides enough space above the motherboard proper to route cables, but you can also install a liquid cooling system with dual 120mm fans on the radiator if you are so inclined. Suffice it to say, getting the 8-pin auxiliary power cable routed behind the board and plugged in was about as easy as I could ask.
From there, everything else was just as simple. Pop out two drive panels and slide the optical drives in, and they snap and lock into place. Installing the hard drives was also easy, although if you have a 2.5" SSD like I did you'll have to futz around with trying to pop one of the pins out of the drive tray to get it installed. Installing the SSD was probably the most confused I got during the entire operation; Corsair doesn't include very useful instructions with the case and while most of it is self-explanatory, documentation that's a little more thorough wouldn't hurt.
Where I did run into trouble was in routing cables. While they do route to the back of the tray very nicely and easily, that whole region is going to turn into spaghetti in short order. Corsair includes zip ties, but they aren't reusable like the ties in the back of the P182's tray are. As usual the most egregious offender is the main power cable from the power supply. Unfortunately, while the side panels are flexible and designed to bow a little bit to give you some breathing room, this means that they bow out at the bottom corners when cables are cramped in the back. I imagine a cleaner cabling job could probably be done to alleviate this, but nonetheless just a touch more space in the back really wouldn't have hurt this case.
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philosofa - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
As I have nothing better to do.. ;)- Anandtech is a site that seems to draw its reviewers primarily from, and is geared in large part towards, the US audience.
- England is not a sovereign nation, the country is called the United Kingdom, or Britain. - If you need help locating this nation on a map you could ask your grandparents :P
- Britain officially measures in the metric system, with the exclusion of distances, which are denoted in miles (aka a 'funnny' measurement). There is the odd exception (e.g. heights are still often given in feet colloquially), but if Anandtech were a British site, you'd be finding the measurements in metric.
killerclick - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
They should also have fan diameters in Imperial.Folterknecht - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
I don't have to ask my (grand)parents where to find GB on a map. On 27th of june this year we sent them back to their islands :-)But I remember an event back in the late 1990s - an international spacemission to mars failed, because some idiots were unable to use standart measurements.
As a website that deals with electronics and not corn prices in Iowa, additional specification in metric system for all people interestet isn't to much to ask?!
philosofa - Saturday, November 27, 2010 - link
I believe as at the 27th of November you're also planning to send other immigrants back to their homelands due to German multiculturalism having "failed, utterly failed"* ? I think you'll find that the match you were referring to was the England team, not GB if we're being pedantic (ok I'm being desperate with the last comment, good game and well won Deutschland, England was utterly outclassed) .The mission failed because the scientists -mixed- imperial and metric measurements, which is also arguably a good case for not ever using both lol. However troll physics aside I have to agree given the presumably large international readership of Anandtech it would be very sensible to at least have metric, I just think it's unfair to get self-righteous about it as it's an American site and we can all look it up easily.
*Chancellor Merkel
vol7ron - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
I don't get why any fan has a manual fan speed this day in age. Do the mobos not have enough inputs?Fan noise should never be a factor when it comes to cooling, you should set a temperature and have the processing units decide what needs to be done in order to keep things at that temperature.
I think if people want fan controls, they should look at case add-ons that fit into pci slots or drive bays.
Naennon - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
i really like the 600Tperfect cable management and it is HUGE! for a midi tower case
the included fancontrol can control 4 fans from 10 to 12V
it's not silent at all.. so i've used some 7V adapter to keep it silent
you can take a look at a 600T used for my rig
http://www.sysprofile.de/id86892
that case provides a lot of cooling options
the front fan can take the phobya 200mm radiator
the top fan can handle a dual 120 radiator in cooperation with 2 x 120 fans or with some modding
you can put that 200mm fan outside the case but within the top cage
and you can use another 200mm radiator
this is a dual 200mm radiator watercooling!!! nearly the same performance as two 360 radiators will do!
finally this case is great and i love it :)
sorry for the crowd-english! :D
Phoenixlight - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
This is certainly not a cool case, if you actually compare it to other cases it sucks at cooling:http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2010/09/23/...
Dustin Sklavos - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
You'd better tell mine that, then, because it's running nice and frosty.Phoenixlight - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Well you can see the results for yourself in the link I posted, if you've replace the stock fans and use LN2 then that's something different.erple2 - Saturday, November 27, 2010 - link
The problem is that for Dustin's review, he evaluated the results that he saw, not what some other (random) review site may or may not have seen. I have no reason to believe that Dustin is lying, so I stand by Dustin's comments above.I'm sure that you can cobble together a more expensive rig that has better cooling characteristics, with custom fans, and additional pieces. However, at the end of the day, this review was about the stock 600T case. Dustin showed what the temperatures were, plain and simple. It would have been nice to compare the temps directly with the P182 in the review, but other than that, the temperatures all look fine.