Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the corsair carbide series 300 R I first had the pleasure of laying eyes on this case at CES 2012 and now I have one here in well I can't really call it the studio just at home where I happen to have some light set up so that I can shoot some videos but here I have it somewhere where I can show it to you guys so let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves the carbide series 300 Aria is a compact expression of the Corsair philosophy great systems begin with a great case open the easy access side panel find a builder friendly design with three tool free optical drive bays and port will free hard drive bays with integrated 2.5 inch SSD compatibility there's room for extra long graphics cards and it keeps your Hardware cool with amazing air flow including 140 millimeter front fan 120 millimeter rear fan which should be compatible with the H 80 as well ok and dust filters are removable for features much like this maybe the foundation of your neck system ok interesting so let's go ahead and get it opened up you know what give me a sec here guys now that we've got out of the box we can have a bit of a look at this particular chassis it does come packed in a hard foam I do prefer a more soft foam because it can be a little bit more robust during shipping especially once the system is fully loaded although as you can see by the way I'm manhandling it this case is not that heavy so it is far less of a concern than it is with heavy cases and they've gone with more than inch thick foam so 99.99% of the time it's going to be fine and remembering that shipping is more of an issue in Canada than it is to anywhere else just because of the size of this country and how sparsely populated it is so cases often travel very far before they eventually reach the intended recipient so what else we got included here bit of a QuickStart guide but that's about it so let's go ahead and buckle down here so the first thing we see is the front of the case which has and I'm a big fan of this actually it has that plastic brushed thing going on and I'm going to show you guys ah yeah I'm going to show you guys why I like that so much and it's going to involve removing this computer which has my cat perched on it and then moving my backpack which is in the way on this door in here so no no you don't have to follow me in here I'm just gonna bring out a brushed aluminum side panel from my case so here ha you're going to need to get the light just right but you can see all along the back edge of the side panel our fingerprints can you see that can you see the blemishes and the finish yeah you can kind of see you could kind of see it there and that shot you can kind of see it here okay so why don't I just wipe them off and the answer is because I cannot you cannot completely clean brushed aluminum because what happens is the oils and acids and your fingers H into that anodized brushed aluminum finish and you cannot completely clean it so I love this plastic brush thing is the same as is on the back of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 because it looks good it's lighter than metal although not by much aluminum doesn't weigh much and as much as you touch it you can actually clean it off so sorry I've harped on that enough let's keep going I love the industrial look at this design of this case overall you can see these little I mean they're just for aesthetics but they look like kind of you know yeah like kind of industrial with these these bolt things going on here we've got three five in a quarter-inch base power and reset switches headphones and microphone two USB 3.0 ports and then we have a front thing which 100% sure how it works although I felt some kind of a something going on down there what's that I haven't actually taken this apart I've only seen it on demo at the at the Corsair suite so pardon me for for my ignorance there guys yeah okay so what is this down here nothing apparently okay so we have a removable fan filter which is not that easy to remove frankly not so that's kind of a shame so you do have to peel back some tabs in order to get that to to come off although you'll be able to blow it out sort of 99% of the time and then I guess if you really wanted to wash it you can take it off other than that the inside is pretty run-of-the-mill this is interesting though this is a nice touch instead of going with plastic security pieces for the panel's courser has gone with these pronged metal pieces and I don't know if you guys noticed but in my unboxing of Shinobi XL I actually when I took off the top panel without even realizing it immediately I broke off those plastic pieces so this this is the kind of thing that answers a question or like addresses a concern that I sort of had about cases in general because I've never seen this before before I even had a chance to talk to anyone about it so that's really cool kudos Corsair way to go so dual 120 s or 140 s it comes with 140 millimeter fan you can throw another one in there to put cooling over your hard drives there's a fair bit of restriction on these fans but they've done a little bit to alleviate this problem by putting in some some perforations here in addition to the holes that you see on most cases right here so let's go ahead and work our way around the side we find a pretty standard looking side panel over there on the other side we find dual 120 s or 140 s on the other side so you can use that to cool your graphics card on the bottom we find a filter for the bottom intake power supply as well as nice grippy rubber feet and on the back of the case we find that once again a pretty run-of-the-mill design so we've got our 120 millimeter exhaust with all this is interesting so they've bulged out the 120 millimeter grill a little bit to give you a bit more between the back of the fan and the grill this not only reduces the turbulence and increases the airflow it's able to push through but it also reduces the noise just a little FYI for you guys some perforations here bottom mounted power supply and everything's looking pretty hunky-dory in there here we have dual 120 s or dual 140 s would have preferred to see the 120 centered and seen a couple more holes put in it just so that if you're running a radiator such as an H 100 you would be able to have that radiator centered because you can see it and hold on a second I just gotta throw this mouse for my cat to is bothering my filming assistant alright there we go let's put the front back on before we get too much further here I do want you to guys to I want you guys to appreciate the case the case is finished design rather than just you know with me having 20 depart already more ventilation here on the sides so that is how those front 140 millimeter fans are getting all their air flow not only from these sides but also the mesh in the front as well as this hole in the bottom so very very good access to fresh air for those fans all right here we go take off those thumb screws side panels pull off the side panel so this is a more value oriented case but Corsair still managed to keep the side panel reasonably strong although it is nothing compared to you know something like the 650d or the 800 d which are obviously very very high-grade cases which go ahead and take off this other side panel as well give you guys a brief look at the other side here there you go that is a huge CPU cutout so no matter where your CPU socket is located on your board remember every time the every time the CPU socket changes the the average sort of usual locations tend to shift around a little bit so they've planned for the future giving you as much space as they possibly can in terms of cable management room you can see we have a fair bit of space back there we've got an entire thumb width which is a pretty good indicator we should be able to fit a 24-pin connector back here with no issues whatsoever we've also got cable management holes here here here and here allowing us to also here for the eight pin access the optical drives the hard drives any other kinds of drives we might install in the front of the case that's about it I wouldn't have minded seeing another cut out here maybe on a like a revision you know 1.1 or something like that because some other boards these days do have the eight pin in the middle and unless you have a power supply with a very long cable you might not make it all the way sort of over here from that hole so just something to bear in mind although Oh No look at this ah they thought of that you can probably run it through here no problem because you can see where the motherboard mounts are so you should be able to squeeze it in there alright what else we got on the back this can this can serve as routing for your front panel audio because most motherboards have that located over there although you might have to cheat a little bit and push your heart push it through before you put the power supply and stuff like that and I think that covers it for this side of the case yes it does ok let's flip it around here so here's our tool is five and a quarter inch base here is the enormous space that we have in this case accommodating up to four hundred and fifty millimeter graphics card I mean imagine that it would be like this much longer than a motherboard so I don't think that's coming anytime soon but there you go Corsair will be ready for it regardless okay we've also got our three and a half inch or two and a half inch hard drive mounts so there are the two and a half inch mounting holes these don't look that strong but trust me once you put a drive in them they are significantly more robust here's how Corsair ships the accessories and doodads let's have a look what we got in here some zip ties for cable routing some screws we're not getting a whole lot of extras but there isn't a whole lot to supply I mean something like an 800 d comes with cables for the hot-swap and stuff like that but this doesn't really have that does this come out no it doesn't I mean other than that I think we've pretty much covered it I mean you got your dual one for use in the front you got your dual 140 s up here you got your 120 back here you got your one built into the power supply here this is a very very capable case and course our always does such a good job of these little details even on their value cases black interior all black cables down to the connectors on the very end front USB three is with an internal header which they all should have been from day one but no one could decide on a standard and I think that pretty much wraps it up this is going to just if you want my opinion these are just going to clean up in that sub hundred dollar case market because it's it doesn't come down necessarily to like the materials that are used it's a steel case you know with a plastic front bezel but it comes down to the design and the engineering that goes into it because it looks really good and it's I've seen high-end builds done in this case already it does not look like a sub $100 case once you put some decent hardware in it so that's a kudos to Corsair on this one so thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look at the Corsair 300 R don't forget to subscribe to honest tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer