Introducing the Corsair Carbide 400R

Corsair started their enclosure business from the top of the market and worked their way down. Their first case was an expensive black monolith, the Obsidian 800D, popular for watercooling setups but less so for air. They fired a shrink ray at it and came up with the Obsidian 700D, roughly $50 less. It wasn't until the Graphite 600T that they produced a case with an enthusiast pricetag but also a design that deviated from the Obsidian standard; we were very happy with the 600T in our review back in December. That case proved to be a real success for Corsair; so many of its design cues were married to the design of the Obsidian series, and the net result was the even less expensive Obsidian 650D. Yet Corsair still hasn't tackled the sub-$100 market...until now.

What makes the Carbide 400R particularly interesting is that it's Corsair's first positive pressure case design. Not just that, but in many ways it's simultaneously their most advanced design despite being their least expensive. Take a look at these specifications:

The more I examined the Carbide 400R, the more I felt like Corsair was "advancing in reverse." Each new release of theirs is just a little more innovative than its predecessor, and with the 400R we see a lot of features that frankly we'd like to see scale up the chain. Mercifully, though, the extremely flexible system for fans coupled with the increased real estate behind the motherboard tray, LED toggle, and USB 3.0 motherboard header cable are launching at the low $99 price point. That's a straight up win for the consumer: Corsair's first $99 enclosure is also one of its most advanced.

In and Around the Corsair Carbide 400R

If there's one thing Corsair has done well since launching their enclosure arm, it's been making enclosures that are fairly understated in appearance. The Obsidian series are all just variations on a monolithic black enclosure design, and in fact the Graphite 600T's unusual appearance is frankly the most ostentatious in Corsair's lineup, though it's still fairly understated compared to many other cases on the market. Corsair continues this trend with the Carbide 400R.

To get under the magical $100 mark for the 400R, Corsair went a lot more meat-and-potatoes with this design. The mediocre fan controller from the 600T and up is gone entirely, and the port cluster has been stripped of USB 2.0 ports, so it's now purely USB 3.0. On the one hand I appreciate this forward-thinking design, but on the other it makes booting from USB a bit more difficult. I do think it's a net gain, though, especially now that Corsair has switched from routing USB 3.0 to the back of the case to using a motherboard header. The mesh grilles used on the rest of the front of the case are attractive, too, and bordered on either side by a solid trim. Corsair seems to have heard the complaints of users of the 600T as well: you can toggle the LEDs in the front 120mm fans on and off with an easy switch in the port cluster.

Both of the side panels of the 400R bow outward, with the left panel sporting mounting points for a pair of 120mm or 140mm fans. This actually gave me a perfect opportunity to test a pet theory, which is something you'll see later on. Space behind the motherboard tray is a little bit slight, but Corsair seems to want you to move the cabling into the pocket in the opposite side panel, and that actually did work well. I think if there's anything unseemly about the Carbide 400R's appearance, it's the top lip: the front of the case is raised about an inch higher than the back, although this creates a very easy gripping point.

If you kept up with the other two Corsair case reviews, you'll know I'm a huge fan of their interior layout and thankfully very little has changed with the 400R. In fact, once again the interior has even been improved slightly. Corsair keeps the eight expansion slots and rubber grommet-lined mounting holes around the motherboard tray, but loses the awkward power supply mounting system of the 400R's predecessors. The drive cages are also mounted laterally, just the way I like them. I harped on this in my reviews of the NZXT Tempest 410 Elite and BitFenix Shinobi and it bears repeating: lateral drive cages make cabling easier and can substantially reduce potential clearance issues with longer video cards. The six drive trays are even basically the same ones used in the 600T and 650D; the only difference with the 400R is that the drive cages can't be moved anymore. That was a cute feature in the more expensive enclosures, but its omission is a perfectly reasonable corner to cut.

Frankly there's very little I find fault with in the Carbide 400R's design, at least superficially. For a $99 case it has a nicely understated appearance, and the interior looks to make assembly just as easy as it was with the other two Corsair cases. Fantastic.

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?

Testing Methodology

For testing ATX cases, we use the following standardized testbed in stock and overclocked configurations to get a feel for how well the case handles heat and noise.

A refresher on how we test:

Acoustic testing is standardized on a foot from the front of the case, using the Extech SL10 with an ambient noise floor of ~32dB. For reference, that's what my silent apartment measures with nothing running, testing acoustics in the dead of night (usually between 1am and 3am). A lot of us sit about a foot away from our computers, so this should be a fairly accurate representation of the kind of noise the case generates, and it's close enough to get noise levels that should register above ambient.

Thermal testing is run with the computer having idled at the desktop for fifteen minutes, and again with the computer running both Furmark (where applicable) and Prime95 (less one thread when a GPU is being used) for fifteen minutes. I've found that leaving one thread open in Prime95 allows the processor to heat up enough while making sure Furmark isn't CPU-limited. We're using the thermal diodes included with the hardware to keep everything standardized, and ambient testing temperature is always between 71F and 74F. Processor temperatures reported are the average of the CPU cores.

For more details on how we arrived at this testbed, you can check out our introductory passage in the review for the IN-WIN BUC.

Last but not least, we'd also like to thank the vendors who made our testbed possible:

Thank You!

We have some thanks in order before we press on:

• Thank you to Crucial for providing us with the Ballistix Smart Tracer memory we used to add memory thermals to our testing.
• Thank you to Zalman for providing us with the CNPS9900 MAX heatsink and fan unit we used.
• Thank you to Kingston for providing us with the SSDNow V+ 100 SSD.
• Thank you to CyberPower for providing us with the Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive, Intel Core i7-875K processor, ASUS P7P55D-E Pro motherboard, and Samsung BD-ROM/DVD+/-RW drive.
• And thank you to SilverStone for providing us with the power supply and 140mm fans.

Noise and Thermal Testing, Stock

Since the Corsair Carbide 400R doesn't include a fan controller, the case fans are pretty much at the mercy of ASUS's questionable motherboard fan controls. As I mentioned before, though, I opted to test the 400R both in its factory configuration and with an additional two 140mm intake fans mounted to the inside panel to see how much they would improve cooling, if at all. For the other enclosures we've previously tested that do use fan controllers, I've included their most balanced and optimal results.

So far my theory doesn't seem to be working out so well. The improvement in cooling performance is very minor compared to just using the 400R's default fan configuration, with only the Zotac GeForce GTX 580 seeing any real improvement in thermal performance. Overall temperatures are reasonable, just not particularly exciting.

Unfortunately, noise levels aren't so great either. With or without those intake fans, the 400R is one of the loudest cases we've tested at both idle and load. Corsair switched from using a giant intake fan on the front of the enclosure to a pair of 120mm fans, and now that we're testing the 400R I have to wonder if including a fan controller wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all.

Noise and Thermal Testing, Overclocked

While the Corsair Carbide 400R wasn't particularly exciting at our stock settings, there's always the chance it could acquit itself better under a substantially increased thermal load. Bumping the Intel Core i7-875K in our testbed up to 3.8GHz introduces a huge increase in heat for the enclosure to dissipate; let's see if this produces better results or at least a bigger difference as far as the side intake fan performance is concerned.

Once again, thermal performance is decidedly middle of the road, neither terrible nor stellar, and once again the side intake fans seem to benefit the GeForce GTX 580 more than anything. There's definitely room for improvement here, and once again our unlikely hero at $50 more, the Rosewill Thor v2, continues to offer stellar bang for the buck. It's worth noting that the 400R consistently outperforms its predecessor thermally, though.

In the process, one of the major differences between the 650D's design philosophy and the 400R's surfaces: while the Obsidian series was designed for acoustics first, the 400R is geared toward thermal performance. The result is one of the louder cases we've tested. It's not egregiously loud, but other cases have definitely performed better and more efficiently here.

Conclusion: Constantly Improving

I can't be the only person who finds Corsair's progression in case designs a little bit bizarre. As far as thermal design is concerned, the Corsair Carbide 400R is probably one of the best cases in their lineup, and definitely outperforms the pricier Obsidian 650D (and by extension the Graphite 600T). They seem to be learning and experimenting with each new design, which is fantastic, but it's funny to watch that progression go from a $299 rough draft to a $99 refinement.

The strongest point of the Carbide 400R isn't the level of customization in my opinion (though that's definitely a nice touch), but once again it's Corsair's continually stellar internal layout. Whatever my concerns with the cooling and acoustic performance are (and they're certainly relevant to the 400R), there's very little that Corsair could do to make assembling a computer inside the 400R easier short of including a masseuse to rub your shoulders while you work. These enclosures set the bar for ease of assembly, and if nothing else I feel like other vendors should really take note.

On the flipside, Corsair still has some ways to go as far as thermal performance is concerned. The 400R is an improvement, but other enclosures we've tested continue to outperform it. I think there's definitely a lot of room for experimentation with the 400R, finding the right fan configuration and possibly installing a fan controller (though both of these would certainly bring the price up beyond the $99 asking point), so I'm not comfortable completely dismissing the case. Much like the BitFenix Shinobi, Corsair's design is highly expandable, but I do think it also raises the question of how much you're willing to spend on an enclosure before it becomes more sensible to just buy the more expensive one to begin with. That said, there are also a lot of users out there who love to tinker (and you may count me among your numbers), so the idea of an ongoing project may very well be attractive to some buyers.

Ultimately I continue to be a fan of Corsair's work and enjoy watching each successive case improve over its predecessors. I like what they're doing and for the most part adore their aesthetic sense. For the same price you can get the better performing In-Win BUC, but the Carbide 400R is frankly a lot more attractive. If you're going to take advantage of a 240mm radiator (and I still think that's at least a little silly in a sub-$100 case), NZXT's Tempest 410 is probably going to be a better choice than the 400R, at least in terms of clearance. On the other hand, if you want a reasonably-priced case that's attractive and easy to build in, the 400R should be on your shortlist.