Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the Corsair obsidian 350d micro ATX case exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high performance PCs visit Corsair comm / obsidian to learn more welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Corsair 350d now courser initially launched their case line with an obsidian case that was an ATX case a very large one I might add the 800 D and then they followed it up they fleshed out the lineup with additional cases in lower end series such as carbide or graphite and obsidian has been reserved for their extremely high end cases now this is their first micro ATX case and it is not losing the performance heritage of their any of their sort of launch cases which I guess the only one that I can really compare it to is actually the 800 d but let's not worry too much about that the point is this is meant to change the way that people build small high performance systems I mean with boards like a Seuss's gene series which have been available for a couple generations now there's really no reason why you can't put exactly as much cooling in exactly as much performance on a micro ATX system as you can on an ATX system so once I actually figure out how to get the Box open here so you can see my thumb is ah jammed in there trying to get it ah there we go so we'll be back in just a moment now the case itself comes in a hard foam but more on that in a moment let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves on the Box they've got a QR code here photos videos product tour and more but don't worry about that you're watching a video about the product right now blown-up version of the case they've also got some good general details about the overall specs flexible cooling options comes with 140 millimeter intake fan 120 millimeter exhaust fan there are five mounts total the front and top mounts are spaced for 240 millimeter radiators for more cooling options that's what Corsairs done well as they've really integrated liquid cooling options well with their cases not only accommodating for their own products which are usually sort of prefilled all-in-one units but also for custom look cooing I mean this is something that a lot of manufacturers do that drives me absolutely crazy is they operate under this assumption that the consumer is going to buy only their own products and like you know okay but what about consumers who aren't interested in all in one liquid coolers you know so you look at a lot of different cases and they are completely unoptimized for a custom cooling loop um and they call themselves water cooling ready because they put radiator ready spacing in the top so that you could mount an all-in-one so anyway that's just my little rent there of course air doesn't do this particularly looking at their most recent cases like the 350d as well as the 900 d so not the greatest phone that i've ever seen not particularly dense not particularly strong it is a smaller case and this is a factor you don't need to protect it as much in shipping when it's smaller and doesn't weigh as much so I'm sure Corsair take the necessary drop tests like there are standards for this crush testing and all that kind of stuff before bringing the 350 D to market because they've been generally pretty good about packaging overall having worked at an online retailer I in Canada where shipping can often result in things dying very horrible deaths didn't happen too much with Corsair stuff so let's start with the outside of the case we've got a nice big window on the side I like this I don't necessarily always prefer a window that lets you see everything like the power supply and drives and all that kind of stuff but what I like about this particular one is it gives it a very clean look because the sizes of the window isn't overly huge but it's sort of even on all sides and just makes it look very very clean without sort of being over-the-top flashy game arelooking on the front you can see this front plate did seem to mean that kingly spirit that's a shame okay so let's go ahead and speaking of shipping in Canada being a bit of a nightmare let's have a look at the front plate here so it's a beautiful brushed aluminum finish metal front plate hopefully you guys can see that very small innocuous Corsair logo on the bottom they've got two little dots here so that you'll know where to press if you want to remove this and it looks like oh it looks like that comes off that's lucky there we go alright so no actual damage done to the case which is wonderful we've got a removable fan filter here in the front so in the front you can either mount a single 140 millimeter fan or you can do dual 120 millimeter fans you can actually see there are alternate mounting points here here here and here okay I get it now so I'm gonna put this on I hate touching these because it's going to stain ah so I'm going to put this back on so you can see the ventilation comes in around the sides here sides and bottom so there's lots of space there and then what Corsairs done just going to do that is they've put in a dead space here okay okay there we go they've put in a dead space here that's blocked off by these to allow the fans to not be just trying to draw air directly from a plastic plate that's right in front of them so instead they are bringing air in around from the sides where there's that dead space and then they can pull in from there so okay we'll go ahead and remove the front fan filter check this up so it can accommodate a single 140 millimeter fan in the middle which is what Corsair ships it with in the area where there's the least restriction so if you look through that then it goes right directly into the chassis however you have the option we have the included mounting holes here here here here here here and here anyway all over the place to mount dual one 20s or even dual 140 millimeter fans in the front of the case then the other fans won't necessarily have quite the same effectiveness of this one fan but obviously doubling up the fans even if efficiency is reduced a little bit is still going to give you more overall cooling performance so that's a very cool approach to take there on the top of the case alright so two five and a quarter inch bays headphone microphone and reset switches here power switch up here two USB 3.0 super speeds and then yeah two five no quarter-inch base so there that takes care of the front on the top you've got that same flexibility so dual 120 mil or dual 140 millimeter and check this up in order to account for the fact that sometimes the spacing isn't exact on certain liquid coolers or whatever else they've expanded the holes for one of the 140 millimeter mounts so you can change the spacing a little bit if you want that's that's actually a really nice touch as well it goes to show you coarser actually builds system in their systems in their cases before they release them to market which I can't say for everyone on this side there's not a whole lot okay blank side panel here we've got a removable fan filter that's actually one of the most ruggedly designed removable fan filters I've ever seen look at this thing it's like solid usually they're extremely flimsy so let's go ahead and and the rails that it sits in are really nice as well locks into place so you can see there's a little bit of resistance to remove that and then it has like these huge plastic rails sits on that's kind of nice ah the feet are covered in little rubber feet so that it doesn't slide around all over the place and that's cool so check this out all the pieces in the bottom okay so there's rivets here here here here and here but it looks like the drive cages are going to be mounted by screws so we should be able to remove those no problem at the back of the case we find pretty standard oh look at this five PCI expansion slots so they've allowed you to install a dual slot card in the bottom of your n ATX board so that will effectively give you what you would normally have on a board with five expansion slots so you can fill this one fill this one and then you can actually install an additional card in between even if you have something like an SLI setup which is very cool I've always felt that's a limitation of the micro ATX platform is that you can't have two dual slot graphics cards running an SLI or crossfire and have a high end audio card or something like that so that's really cool to see as well 120-millimeter cooling fan in the back liquid cooling holes which Corsair wisely left in because most people won't be using those as well as standard power supply mounting alright let's open this bad boy up and find out what makes her tick thumb screws on the back make it easy to remove the back panel overall um I'd say it's not quite at the same level as I would have expected from an obsidian clasp case looking at case like the 800 D and the 650d in terms of the construction so there's a little bit of flex here as you guys can send me we expect this on a windowed side panel but quite honestly when I wrapped on the other side panel it wasn't really all that Oh inspiring either Oh actually okay that's not as bad as I thought okay well there you go either way I mean it's not built like an 800 D but it's also not priced like an 800 d so there's sort of something to consider all right so once we get inside we've got two or three and a half inch sliding hard drive cages now these are usually flimsy but once you actually put a drive in them they stiffen right up until you can slide those back in there this whole cage comes out I love the use of screws for the construction instead of using rivets so there's those screws on the bottom as well as right here screws on the back this gives you the flexibility so you wanted to looks like just two screws on this side here this gives you the flexibility to remove the whole thing including these two and a half inch mounts that's how you're going to be able to mount those radiators in the front of the case itself which leaves you just with five and a quarter inch base up here in the bottom they've of course thought support for nice long power supplies I mean Corsair builds an awful lot of power supplies so they're going to want you to be able to use anything from their range and something that they're going to brand as a performance class case and they've done another wise thing here which is to improve it include enough cable routing holes in the bottom this is huge so many case guys have like one hole at the bottom and then like six holes around the motherboard tray it's like okay well how where are all these cables going to come from if I wasn't able to put them through here so there's two big ones down here there's one up here for your 8 pin or your 4 pin one up here for whatever you might need to run to the very top right hand edge of your board maybe they want you to use it for routing the front i/o or something like that by the motherboard tray and then once here for your 24 pin or whatever else assuming you're not just routing them around the edge of the motherboard tray here motherboard tray itself feels quite solid considering that there's an extremely large cutout for the CPU so no matter where your CPU socket is positioned you shouldn't have too much difficulty with that and I just want to have a look at check that out so that's how this comes out there you go there's your two and a half inch drive now so these are awesome hey slick can you throw me an SSD preferably Corsair CI now I'm putting that now I'm putting the pressure on him there we go haha of course our Neutron GTX so this is how the installation process works here you just pop this bad boy in and it loads just like that look at that it's spring-loaded too so when you open it up it pops it out for you you don't have to do any of the work this is actually better than the one that I saw implemented on I believe it was these 300 are that one was a little bit stiff and a little bit hard to get the drives out of looks like Corsair figured that out and got that fixed with this guy right here so there you go now there's tons of space there so what's the point of all this I guess would be the next question oh yeah there's some internal cables and stuff that you might want to see of course there of course always with the nice little touches I mean it's all about spending money in the right places spend money making that OAM use black cables they don't like it because you know it's harder to QC but make them do it and then maybe the side panels a little bit thinner or whatever else don't worry too much about that because this is the way the people end up with systems that actually look good and look high-performance and look high-class that's why Corsair cases have so many build logs done in them where it just looks really good because they spend the time and spend the money on those little finishing touches same thing even youth I'd like to see someone implement a less bulky USB 3 connector but I guess you know you can't have everything that you want necessarily but either way it's all black even the connector here at the end I've seen a lot of them that are black except this little bits blue you can still see it you can still see it coming out included little bits here so you got fan screws that's good you got some other more different screws you got some zip ties and all that kind of stuff I like this personally when they include one stationary standoff that doesn't get something screwed into it because it gives you a reference point for where to position the board as you're putting it into the case not everyone does this and even many brands that do it don't do it consistently so there you go torque there if you're watching this keep doing this I like this I appreciate this there's a tool list five and a quarter Bay but as usual you don't have to use it to lessly you can screw screws in and that will actually be more secure for things like shipping it around and I think we're pretty much done here so why do we need this if you want to build a high-performance system you know SLI crossfire whatever else and you don't want to expend any more space than you absolutely need to if you want something that could be portable say for example if you're a video production house and you want to be able to move around a rendering workstation with you that's not that heavy then something like this would be a fantastic choice and the fact that its windowed and liquid cooling ready and all that good stuff is just kind of icing on the cake at this point thanks for checking out this unboxing and first look on - tech tips don't forget to subscribe from one boxing's reviews and other computer videos