Corsair Carbide 400R: Succeeding in Reverse
by Dustin Sklavos on September 3, 2011 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- mid-tower
Assembling the Corsair Carbide 400R
You'll forgive me if this part of the review is pretty boring: putting together the Corsair Carbide 400R was basically a painless procedure that I once again have a very difficult time finding any real faults with. Internally the 400R is very similar to its predecessors, just a little bit smaller. One disappointing loss is the latches Corsair uses for mounting side panels in its other enclosures, with the side panels now affixed using thumbscrews.
Getting the motherboard in was easy enough to do, although the 400R is missing the center "alignment nub" that the other Corsair cases have. On the flipside, the motherboard standoffs were already installed, a much appreciated convenience. I can't stress this enough, and it's something I want other enclosure manufacturers to pay attention to: Corsair designs these things to be as convenient as humanly possible. Whatever their acoustic or thermal properties, Corsair cases are incredibly user friendly. Even the thumbscrews used for the side panels in the 400R are at least loosely attached to the panels themselves, making the screws impossible to lose.
Mounting the optical drive, hard drives, and SSD was almost exactly the same procedure as in previous Corsair cases, except once again Corsair has done us one better. The optical drive mounting system is nigh identical, but the 2.5"/3.5" drive caddies now feature a bar with two pins that snaps in and out of the side of the caddy. In their older design, you'd have to pop a pin out to mount a 2.5" drive, and that pin was hilariously easy to lose. The bar is much bigger and thus much easier to keep somewhere safe. It's a small touch but still an improvement.
Clearance for the video card was just fine, and the rubber grommets require effort to pop out of the holes around the motherboard tray. The cutout in the tray for heatsink backplates is also a bit bigger now. In fact, getting the power supply in and routing the cabling was relatively simple and resulted in a very clean interior, with my only concern and sticking point being the AUX 12V line (as it so often is). Clearance above the motherboard could stand to be improved, and I'm honestly not 100% certain this is the best case for a 240mm radiator. Corsair swears on their page and on the 400R's spec sheet that there's support, and I'm sure Corsair's own H100 probably fits just fine, but I look at the Asetek 240mm liquid cooler I have handy and become much more skeptical.
Corsair's interior design for the 400R is one of the best I've seen, at least from a user experience perspective. Whether these things work out thermally and acoustically is another matter entirely, but at least the enclosure is very easy to work with.
For noise and thermal testing I figured I'd have a little fun with the Carbide 400R, though, and test a pet theory. I'm of the opinion that side intake fans are oftentimes very effective at improving airflow and as a result can actually reduce fan noise. Outside of SilverStone's rotated enclosure designs, our best-performing cases thus far have had massive intake fans (at least 200mm) mounted on the side panels. Curious to see if there's a pattern here, I mounted two 140mm SilverStone air penetrator fans to the side as intakes and used the included power cables to run them at five volts instead of their native 12. This creates an enclosure with just one exhaust and four intakes, which could very well be an imbalanced design, but isn't that what testing is for?
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Death666Angel - Saturday, September 3, 2011 - link
Hello!I don't understand that passage. I haven't used USB 3.0, yet. Is there some problem with booting from USB3.0 ports? Shouldn't they be backward compatible? :-)
Thanks for the review! Could you add metric measurements? :-)
livingplasma - Saturday, September 3, 2011 - link
I've had much better luck with side fans being used as exhaust rather than intake. This was true when I tested with my an Antec Three Hundred with a 4890 non reference that exhausts from the back and front, there was a slight advantage with the side fans as exhaust under load. With aftermarket cpu coolers like the Scythe Setsugen 2, the cooling advantage was even greater. CPU and board temps were also lower than with the side fans as intake. Only during idle or cpu only loads did side fans as intake performed a little bit better. Same results even with a pair of 6870's in the Cooler Master 690 II. Another interesting thing I've noticed is that all the fans I've tried are less noisey when pushing through a grill vent rather than trying to suck air through them.ckryan - Saturday, September 3, 2011 - link
I guess you have to admire what corsair is doing, even If I don't find the exterior to be particularly sexified. For an attractive, unusual, and generally backassward affair, see the Lian Li PC A05NB. I've been a hopeless shill for it for some time now, but a little Corsair magic on the inside wouldn't hurt (much).Hey, another case review so soon? Awesome.
B3an - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
Can you start reviewing cases like this that actually look nice and not like cheap tacky crap like they were designed by a 12 year old? I know they're very rare but these mythical beasts do exist!Dustin Sklavos - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Well shoot, I was just going to try and review as many bug ugly cases as I possibly could, but since you made the request I'll get right on it!TrackSmart - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
I checked out the Lian Li PC A05NB (mentioned by ckryan above). For $90 on Newegg, I'm pretty curious to see how it would compare. The Corsair is not awful, but I still wouldn't put it in my living room. The Lian Li case, however, is undersstated enough to go anywhere.Maybe Dustin can request one of the Lian Li's for a showdown - if he isn't already buried in cases to review.
softdrinkviking - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
i just put together one of these for my dad, and it was great to work with. I didn't cut my hand even once!also, the usb 3.0 on the front is a huge plus if your popping external drives on/off all the time.
one thing I did differently was I mounted the PSU upside-down becasue the holes on my seasonic didn't line-up properly otherwise.
AssBall - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - link
If your PSU fan is on the bottom, like many, you'd want to mount it upside down anyway.wyhtmgm - Friday, October 14, 2011 - link
I have a 650TXV2. The holes on the PS aren't symmetrical, but the holes on the case are symmetrical so it lines up the same way whether it's rightside up or upside down, i.e. I didn't encounter softdrinkviking's problem. I'm not that happy about how it lines up, since the head of one of the screws is sort of holding against the edge of sheet metal instead of going through a hole, but I haven't installed a power supply in years so maybe that's normal.Is the power supply in the review picture rightside up or upside down? In the picture I don't see the fan, which suggests rightside up, but the picture may just be too dark. There are other clues that it could be upside down; the position of the cables, and there's no visible label on top.
The PS would probably run cooler rightside up, but my floor tends to be dusty and I don't like the idea of blowing dust into the PS.
Valitri - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
I currently use a CM 690 with 4 Yate Loon 120mm fans (1 front intake, 1 rear exhaust, 2 on Hyper 212+ push/pull out the back), and 3 Cheap NZXT White 140mm fans (1 bottom intake, 2 top exhaust, NZXT cheap white ones). The case has been banged up during moves and 3 different builds in it. I also redrywalled a room it was in so it's not clean either. I just ordered this 400R and will be ordering a few new fans for it as well. I curently load 54C on my 2500k at 4.5ghz after about an hour of Prime, so I'll test that against the 400R. I am also curious if my 6970 will run cooler if I install side fans on the 400R. The way my side panels work on my 690, I don't have room for side fans. The most important thing to me will probably be noise, I wish I had a way to accurately measure it. My case is very loud, and my fans seem to rattle sometimes.