Gadgetory

the case industry is currently obsessed with 70 to 100 dollar mid towers that share a few similar features like power supply shrouds minimalistic drive support and generally a move away from five and a quarter base this is a trend that we think started with the NZXT eh 440 a couple years ago and it has persisted through the fantex Eclipse P 400 which is brand new rose Wells new gun near case the NZXT s340 and now course has 400 C which is what we're reviewing today all of these cases have a sort of unique take on the idea of a mid tower in the $7,200 range with a power supply shroud and cleaner cable management and today we are looking at Corsairs take on that idea Corsair is 400 C follows hot on the heels of its 600 C launch both fronting a similarly clean exterior but drastically different under the hood reviewed the 600 C favorably for it's risky take on inverted motherboard installation and further praised the 600 C for a chart-topping GPU cooling performance the 400 C is similar really only in appearance internally the $90 400 C and 400 q cases host a more traditional motherboard mount they remove optical drive bays that were in the 600 C and shrink the overall size of the case by a couple of inches check the article in description below for more specifics on the case internals the test methodology and aesthetics discussion Corsairs 400 C is targeted at the sub $100 market landing itself amongst a herd of similarly priced similarly designed alternatives the s 340 has been around for a while now and is a staple case for mid towers and the fan tax Eclipse P 400 is brand new as as Roseville's gun near and they all have common design interests common price for the most part and different implementations of power supply shrouds and cable management features Corsair however makes the biggest claims with regard to functionality and cooling performance in this review we're looking at ease of installation at thermal performance of CPU and GPU temperatures on the diode level and then we also have some unique tests that I think a lot of other sites won't offer and that's because we tested almost every possible air cooling configuration in here do not do the liquid stuff but tested the case fan placement check for optimal fan placement if you add another fan and we learned a bit along the way about air coolers tower coolers and blower fans interact with one another in a case like this mid tower case starting with the basics the 400 C abandons optical drive sport moves the 3.5 inch drive cages to the bottom front of the case concealed partly by the two-piece power supply shroud the shroud somewhat reminds us of the half X and its original one-piece shroud and it's not riveted to the case with the 400 seats just two plastic components that lock together for better cable concealment you can remove these if you want to coarser intelligently positions a PCIe routing hole in the top of the PSU shroud allowing direct and clean GPU wiring unfortunately a few issues do stem from this region of the case the first is with 180 millimeter or larger PS use and Corsair correctly advertises that the 400 C can support 180 millimeter PS use like our test PSU and actually will support a bit larger but the 3.5 inch hard drive cage must be removed to adequately support our 180 millimeter modular PSU the cables were pinched right against the cages and were unusable until the removal of those cages once gone we're left to rely upon the 3 2.5 inch SSD sleds on the rear of the motherboard tray since there is no additional 3.5 inch drive support throughout the case but this was okay because we're actually pretty impressed with Corsairs 2.5 inch drive sled and as trivial a thin as it is the spring-loaded action and general design of the sled allows for very easy installation and an overall improve the user experience this is something we hope will be adopted as the case industry moves forward with these types of cases the 400 CS PSU shroud also proved restrictive with front io connectors we had to route the cabling above the PSU shroud which is functionally fine but a little bit uglier Corsair could improve this by lengthening the cables to better support motherboards which inset the FPC or it can shorten the PSU shroud lengths marginally so that the cables don't get as pinched and make it difficult to close the power supply shroud and latch it together stock cooling is simplified to a set of two fans one 140 millimeter and one 120 millimeter fan in the rear and that shoots a straight line of air from the front and out the back because the 400 C is at PSU shroud has been shifted to the bottom and that means that all the is basically up at the top of this case so you can do two top mounted fans in the top if you wanted to add one 40s or fit larger radiators to 40 to 80 included and we tested a few non stock configurations with these top mounted fans and a second front mounted fan to determine which setup made the best sense when looking at CPU and GPU thermals time to start talking about cooling for the full methodology hit the link in the description below to learn about how we do these tests and check out the greater details that may not be revealed in this video what we're looking at today includes CPU and GPU diode temperatures we're also measuring the impact of fans as placed in different locations of the case and then we'll do a comparative analysis toward the end against the other similarly priced cases on the market let's start with our 400 C specific test for optimal case fan placement you can see a quick chart of what we tested here but it's perhaps a bit more clear on the website our range for these tests is just 4.0 7 Celsius so that's a forty three point six to thirty nine point five three Celsius range and all in all a fairly inconsequential performance impact but the world of cooling is often a fight for single degree gains if that so a single degree is a pretty big deal with these cases the stock configuration performs only marginally worse than mounting an additional 140 millimeter fan in the front and that's aligned with the GPU so it makes sense optimal CPU cooling scenarios all center around intake heavy set ups with one rear fan still mounted top exhaust setups actually end up siphoning fresh cool intake from the CPU before the air ever hits the tower cooler and that effectively suffocates the CPU for a constant flow of cool air from the front intake despite its to insignificance for CPU thermals adding the lower mounted 140 millimeter intake fan noticeably improved GPU cooling performance within the 400 C a delta of two point six six Celsius or four point six four percent difference and this is the best possible configuration for raw GPU thermals note that ours uses a blower fan so may vary if you have push fans this is the configuration we'd probably recommend as they go to just add in one extra 140 millimeter in the front bottom intake interestingly dumping more cool air into the system from the top doesn't further improve GPU thermals there's an improvement over stock but GP temps actually increase slightly from the 140 millimeter front intake addition configuration and this is because the top intake fans assist in dissipating heat from the tower cooler which is reflected in diminished CPU thermals but as a result that he gets pushed down and into the back of the GPU if you're adding one fan we think it makes the most sense to place that fan in the front bottom slot moving on to the comparative analysis we look at the 400cc the fan tax eclipsed p400 brand-new case NZXT is staple s340 the Rosewell gun near also new and then we've included course there's $150 600 c because although it's a different market it's tied by family to the 400 c so we want to see a comparison of how these two differ when it comes to the 160 ish dollar price difference and to the size difference in the 400 c the 600 c shows a 5.25% advantage of the corsair 400 C with the entire chart demonstrating a range of 3.25 Celsius the 400 seat runs at 58 point six zero Celsius for the GPU but has a slightly hotter idle than it's nearby competition at four point nine seven Celsius competing cases operate idle at three point one five C to four point two to C for the GPU this is effectively inconsequential to basically all users and seems like result of the stock intakes fan positioning that's what's causing this difference for CPU thermals we again see higher idle temperatures than some competitors the s 340 runs a bit warm a trend for an z axis recent and steel heavy cases but load temperatures are fully acceptable at forty one point four seven Celsius in fact CPU load thermals for the 400 C planted firmly above its same priced competition beaten out in this chart only by Corsair zone 600 see the chart range is 3.2 on Celsius load with a 400 C versus s 340 load Delta of just 1.0 8% which is wholly imperceptible and the fan tax Eclipse P 400 has a slightly more noticeable gain so you see the 400 C outperforming the fan tax eclipsed P 400 by three point six five percent again favoring the 400 C so that's still small but it is certainly more noticeable than the 1.0 eight percent of the s 340 the Corsair 400 C has a I build quality over all strong assembly and uses good materials it's got superior cooling performance to all of the cases we tested that are similar to this one other than of course coarser 600 C which is a bit more expensive and overall it's a pretty good case to build with there are a few complaints we had the main one being the power supply limitation so if you're running a 180 or larger PSU you are going to encounter some issues with the harddrive cages so do keep that in mind you may actually want to downsize your PSU if you haven't bought it yet the other thing in terms of build quality this front panel uses little plastic clips that are very easy to snap off from just one or two removal cycles if you're not very careful and that is something we've seen with these similar clips on coarser cases in the past something that bike course start to do would be to adopt something like the Manta mounting mechanism which you can see in our article no Manta and that uses basically reinforced pegs rather than these sort of clips that you depress to get out of the case and they're much stronger it's easier to pop on and off there's less fear of damaging something so that is a major point of improvement I think Corsair should look toward in the future and I don't mean there's a little alligator clips that pinch either those won't really fix the issue the side window is pretty nice I do like these sort of larger wide form-factor side windows it gives a good look at the inside the case there's no restrictions in terms of visibility do the hard drive cages but the one thing that is a bit annoying is when you're building the case the side panel is hinged so it can't be completely removed and that's obviously a little bit annoying when it's out on a table requires 2 times the space because you've got the hinges door hanging out there but very small because one how often are you going to be rebuilding these cases anyway and 2 how often are you going to be opening that side window the Corsair 400 C case does have pretty good thermals it's imperceptible to the general user in terms of differences between this case and the others on the bench actually imperceptible to basically all users but it is superior in that regard so we have to give it credit for that build quality other than the few complaints mentioned is fairly high and overall the case is on in terms of its appearances but I will let you decide if you like it or not from the b-roll that's really what the video is for anyway so overall $90 does put it a bit above the nearby competition I would strongly suggest researching the NZXT s340 the fantex p400 new eclipse case and then you could look at some other cases - like the 600 C The Rose won't come near I suppose is worth looking at while you're in there but the main ones would be the s 340 and the 400 C and then you make your decision on those based really mostly on what you think looks the best because in terms of cooling they're fairly similar in terms of build and installation and features they're fairly similar so it's mostly going to come down to aesthetics and that is wholly up to you to decide thank you all for watching link in description below for more information hit that patreon link the post roll video if you wanna help us out directly and I'll see you all next time you