The Corsair Carbide 400R case is a mid range case from Corsair‘s Carbide Series. This case comes packaged in a large brown cardboard box with various details about the product on the front and back.
The case was well packaged and no problems were found during the unpacking. In fact this is one of the easiest cases I have had the pleasure of removing from its box due to the nice hand hold built into the top of the case. I just wish more manufacture’s would learn to provide medium to large cases with options like this.
The case includes a manual and a leaflet on how to contact a help line if you experience any issues with the case. The help line is intended to be a 1st point of contact rather than returning the case.
Inside the case, neatly locked into a hard drive caddy, is a small cardboard box which contains the various screws, cable ties and a USB2 -> USB3 conversion cable.
The case itself has 2 removable side panels, both have retaining thumb screws (with cross heads) to prevent the screws from being lost with the left hand side panel having 2 mesh fan mount locations.
The front of the case features a control panel with the standard headphone/microphone 3.5mm jack sockets, firewire connection and two USB 3 connection ports. This panel also provides an on/off button, reset button, front fan light button and drive activity LED. Below the control panel are the four 5.25 inch bays with a removable mesh front and then below that there are 2 front 120mm fans.
The back of the case features a bottom mounted PSU cut-out, 8 expansion slots, 4 holes for water cooling and a 120mm exhaust fan.
Once the side of the case was removed you are presented with a large area for the installation of the various components required for a gaming rig etc.
The PSU area features 4 rubber mounts to reduce vibration through the case.
Underneath the case is a dust filter for the lower 2 fan mounts only. One is used for the PSU, the other could be used for a water cooling radiator or additional fan.
The case is provided with three 120mm fans, two intake fans are mounted in the front of the case and one exhaust fan is mounted at the back of the case.
At the time of the review the Corsair Carbide 400R is retailing for approximately £76.00.
The case is well made from dark grey plastic coated steel which provides you with a solid feel without having to be an Olympic Russian weight lifter before attempting to lift it. As previously noted the addition of the handle for picking up the case made moving it very easy.
The case is well laid out with the four 5.25 inch bays at the top front and the six 3.5 inch bays behind the two front 120mm intake fans.
The six HDD/SSD mounts are made from moulded plastic with strengthened plastic release clips. In comparison to the rest of the case they feel rather flimsy, but are strong enough to support and hold either a HDD or SSD.
After looking at the case for a while I think I may have found a flaw. The positioning of the fan light switch is just above the reset switch. Personally I would have preferred the reset switch and the hard drive light to be swapped around as at present you could reset your machine when all you intended to do was switch the fan lights on or off!
Testing Methodology/Setup
My existing installation of Windows 7 was used for these tests as no new driver based hardware was being reviewed. I used Core Temp to monitor the CPU temperatures and MSI Afterburner to monitor the GPU temperatures. Load on the CPU was generated using Prime95, whereas load on the GPU was generated by using the following three benchmarking tools:
Initial testing setup saw me playing games (any excuse) for a period to get the rig nice and warm. Gaming stopped and a cool down period of 15 minutes was allowed. This cool down period was used between each run whether it be CPU testing or GPU testing.
CPU testing involved running Prime95 for 30 minutes and recording the maximum temperature and ambient temperature at the end of the run.
GPU testing was carried out by running each benchmark for 15 minutes; a maximum GPU temperature was taken from MSI Afterburner. The ambient temperature was recorded at the end of the run.
Both CPU and GPU tests will be conducted in my existing case and the new Corsair Carbide 400R Mid Tower case at both 3.3Ghz and 4.4Ghz (my rigs current over clock speed).
Hardware Installation
The Corsair Carbide 400R Mid Tower Case was very easy to work with and within thirty minutes I had transferred my gaming rig from its current case to the 400R.
Inserting the motherboard backing plate was probably the only part of the installation I could complain about. The lower edge of the case upon which the bottom part of the mounting plate is positioned against is quiet narrow and therefore flimsy, thus allowing the plate to jump when pushed against. This was easily resolved by inserting the top of the plate first.
The motherboard was mounted on the prepositioned motherboard mounting screws, 4 additional screws are provided in the packaging, if required.
Although I didn’t need to remove my Antec KÜHLER H2O 620 CPU cooler I could have easily attached it to the motherboard after it had been mounted in the case as the motherboard backing plate has a large cut out for just this purpose.
Once the motherboard was installed the cabling was easy to keep tidy and hide due to the various grommet covered holes in the backing plate.
My hard drive and SSD drive clipped into two of the drive bay mounts and slid straight into the case. (my SSD was already mounted in a SSD to HDD caddy so I just used this to insert into the drive mount for ease rather than having to unscrew and then re screw the drive into another mount).
My graphics card was held tight by the 2 thumb screws and the motherboard / case connections (Power, Reset, HDD Light etc) were easy to fit due to the space provided by the case.
The sculptured right side of the case provides sufficient room for additional cables at the back of the motherboard. As my PSU has two graphic card power leads and I only required one to run my single graphics card I chose to hide this in the lowest 3.5 inch drive bay.
Once everything was installed and checked it was connected to my screen, keyboard, mouse etc and switched on. Once the machine was up and running the front two LED fans were illuminated, these can be switched off if so desired.
Performance
From a gaming rig point of view, the main performance metric we are interested in is how does a new case affect the overall running of an over clocked machine. As with any over clocked machine this means what effect does the new case have on the rigs temperatures? Is its air flow better or worse than my rig’s current case, a Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus.
So without further delay let’s let the figures speak for themselves.
Its interesting to note that the Corsair Carbide 400R is significantly cooler than the Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus when the machine is idle, but the difference in temperature when the machine is running under load is very similar.
Graphics Cooling Results (Radeon HD 6950 / Various Benchmarks)
I initially ran all the tests with the machine stepped down to the CPU’s default settings of 3.3GHz. The initial temperatures seen from the Corsair Carbide 400R were looking promising when compared to the temperatures recorded from the Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus case. I was therefore very surprised when the tests were run again with the CPU over clocked to 4.4GHz and the temperatures recorded were within 0.25 of a degree for CPU and within 1 degree for graphics (Metro 2033 being the only exception). Initially I thought this was wrong and reran the Unigine Heaven tests to re compare, but the 2nd set of results came back with the same temperatures.
After running all the tests I can report that the acoustic noise from fans in the Corsair Carbide 400R™ are the same as my HAF 912 Plus case. I believe this is due to both cases having the Antec KÜHLER H2O 620 fan being positioned at the top of the cases and both cases having a fan mesh at the same height as the graphics card, thus allowing the fan noise to escape.
Final Thoughts
The Corsair Carbide 400R Mid Tower Case is a solid well made case with good overall cooling and expansion capacity.
The position of the front fan light switch, above the cases reset switch; and the flimsy separator bar between the motherboards backing plate aperture and its top expansion slot are the only minor flaws I could find in the cases construction.
The addition of the hand hold in the top of the case and the difference in size between the Corsair Carbide 400R Mid Tower Case and my rig’s Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus case was noticeable when having to move the cases and install the various components, this made the Corsair Carbide 400R Mid Tower Case nice to work with.
