 "Corsair Carbide 400R Review")
A well-designed PC cabinet does help in ensuring that the insides of your CPU are safe from dust, well ventilated and are functioning well. Corsair have been long runners in their PC cabinet series and now they’ve come up with their new Carbide 400R Mid-Tower Case. It’s a little on the expensive side, but is it worth the bucks? Read on to find out.
USB 3.0 connectivity on the head
Design and Features
The Carbide 400R comes dressed in a full black exterior and interior with powder coating on both sides that future proofs it against rust. Nothing on the cabinet is glossy, the whole finish has a graphite matte feel to it and it does a pretty effective job at keeping fingerprints at bay. The insides of the 400R are extremely smooth and no sharp edges are present, so you can afford to be a little careless whilst plugging in your connections and drives. The only rough surface is at the bottom of the cabinet and it seems to have a sand paper-ish feel to it.
A side view
The Carbide 400R easily looks like a cabinet you’d like to own, based on the looks alone, but it’s the insides that actually matter. It comes with six hard drive and four DVD drive slots along with eight expansion card slots and all of this is brilliantly crafted together. The hard drives are easy to install as they have a side orientation and a clip attachment. They also have four holes inside the case, so there’s support for 2.5-inch drives and SSDs.
The case consists of rubber bushes that minimize any sort of vibration the hard drives may go through. The build of the case is a tad cheap, but when you put in the drive, it’s quite sturdy. All you have to do is flex the case to remove the hard drives, so both insertion and removal is fairly easy. That doesn’t mean that it’s a little flimsy, because the locking mechanism on the case ensures they aren’t accidentally moved from their bay. The optical drive slots have a push-in mechanism that auto locks them into the casing and they’re similarly easy to remove and install. The outer casing consists of thumb screws that don’t come out completely, so there’s less headache in plugging them in and out and the left and right panels smoothly slide into the chassis.
Dust filter at the bottom
The fan intakes air from over the hard drives and it consists of extra filters for preventing dust from entering the cabinet. The lights on the fan can be turned off via the button on the head of the cabinet. Two fans are already given at the front, two more can be added on the top and another two on the side, which makes it a total of seven fan slots with additional slots on the bottom, if required. A radiator can also be attached at the top along with the fans. The system fan header is capable of giving read outs of the fan RPM in the BIOS settings, which is a plus.
Easy to slot in
They’ve also provided a two way tape for cable retention and better routing through the internals of the Carbide 400R. The cable cut outs ensure they don’t meddle with the rest of the configuration and help in better air circulation. There are plenty of water cooling holes as well and there’s a lot of area with mesh, so chances that you’ll face heating issues are extremely low. Power supplies intake a lot of air, so the dust filter underneath does help in keeping the unwanted elements at bay.
The connectors
The front consists of two USB 3.0 slots that come with a head adaptor, so you can plug it into your motherboard that supports USB 3.0. Alternatively, they’ve given a USB 3.0 to USB 2.0 adaptor, so in case there’s no support, the slots can be used as USB 2.0 slots by default. The metal retention clamps on the front board ensure that it fits firmly into the chassis. However, there are no exposed 3.5 inch bays or bracket provisions, so you can’t put in, for example, a card reader at the front, which may be a minor con for some.
The Carbide 400R
Verdict
The Corsair Carbide 400R is priced at Rs. 5,399 (MRP). It’s a little on the expensive side, but it’s a good value for money cabinet. It’s cheaper than the Cooler Master 912, which we reviewed earlier and finds itself well placed among the Cooler Master Gladiator 600 and the older CM 690 II advanced, which lacks a USB 3.0 port. However, on its own the Carbide 400R does a pretty good job of lifting the looks of an otherwise overlooked part of your personal computer. Also, it has got the features and functionality pretty much covered, which makes it a worthy buy.
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