Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the courser obsidian 550d let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves in a billion different languages on the front sound damping material silicon mounts on the fans and hard drive bays - ah - dampe of course our parser to dampen vibration you can cover unused fan locations to further reduce noise rigid steel and brushed aluminum makes it easy build a great system you get built in USB 325 inch SSD support etc etc rugged durability smart features in great looks let's open her up I'm pretty familiar with this case because I actually did a presentation on stage at the NCIX 1st annual tech fair about the 550d which I prepped myself for in late the 2 minutes before of course that was due on stage and asked me to talk about their case for them I haven't actually seen the 550d for more than a couple minutes at CES prior to that so there you go but now I know what I'm talking about in time for my actual video which will persistently be on the interwebs forever so that's good ok close to or not close rather on rigid foams not my favorite at least it's thick it's not that thick yeah I would have expected a little bit thicker than that I guess in their defense that you have a pretty robust box that's going to keep it from getting damaged as as much in shipping it can sometimes happen we've had some poll we've had some interesting samples arrived for tech tips we had one case that didn't use that didn't use a soft soft foam that arrived with the back basically like dented in like that it wasn't from Corsair though don't worry days ok there we go let's go ahead and have a look at this case so it has a very clean overall aesthetic actually let's start with with removing the plastic here at the front because that's going SEC here let me get you guys but what Corsair does with their cases is they they spend money on the manufacturing where it counts so for something like their 650d or even the 800 D it's a steel case just fine strong Steel's good for building things out if you build bridges out of it for crying out loud if you can't build a case out of it then you're probably doing it wrong but they do a nice aluminum front bezel that looks very very very sleek so I personally am a big fan of that right right so Corsair yes they spend the money on their cases where it counts so the front bevel looks outstanding and then the general rest of the case is very plain very professional looking and in line with what we've come to expect from Corsair products in general so the back is pretty nondescript you've got eight PCIe slots though so it is Excel etx compatible your i/o shield you go to 120 or 140 millimeter fan slot water cooling holes although I've questioned the validity of these most people aren't running external water cooling setups we've got a sound dampening foam mounted power supply thing you can go one way or the other you've got ha ha this was premiered on the 800 D someone of course there's now standard dual 120 millimeter fan filtering doodads on the bottom there which is very nice oh look at these rubber feet these are nice these are really tall which gives you actually enough space under the case for some legitimate airflow down here and they're made out of a nice soft rubber and look at these like big l-shaped feet on the front as well very very nice so that's nice little touches so that's a lot keep it from leg flippin just good ok in the front of the case this is a cool feature check this out guys so besides the front microphone headphones reset start harddrive led power LED and front USB 3 has a cool feature check this out so it opens from that side and pick this off which holds in place the front fan filter cover sound dampening material here you got an easily removable filter which comes out probably somehow but I'm really not oh oh I think it's magnetic actually yeah okay here we go so magnetic front fan filter with dual 120 millimeter fans included so you go ahead and throw that on there just like that so ah there that's the side that's a little bit easier to remove very nice okay so we'll go ahead and put this back and put this finally I'm doing it wrong because I'm just having a lot of trouble with what is supposed to be the easiest fan filter ever but it's like - proof edition there we go so let's go ahead and put this back and then I will get to what is actually cool about this so once you close it what will become fairly evident is that you can actually open it from the other side as well so you just clip it in really firmly and then you open it from the other side sound damping material is also present here so this will help reduce noise a little bit another cool thing in line with the sound reduction theme of this case is the fact that there are actually very few vent holes section below vent holes really to speak up in the very front of the case and there's a reason for that I mean there's a couple there's the ones here down the side and there's the ones here down the other side but the reason for that is because vent holes in the front of the case are where a lot of the noise gets passed to the user so they've shaped the front bezel like this see how there's a gap in there sort of not a very big gap but it's a small gap so that the air will actually be pulled in from the back which will reduce the noise that you hear when the case is sitting in front of you on the top we find more sound dampening material in here you can actually take this off permanently if you do decide to male fans here because obviously this solid piece of solid piece of plastic would not be very conducive to so yeah its line is creepy it would not be very conducive to airflow so you just take this off and then you have like sort of a modular interface we've got more magnetic fan I'll just take that off when it gets dirty and go clean it and then that is what the top of the case will look like if you opted not to use this although if you wanted a case that's more airflow optimized I'd recommend just going one for 650d or something or three 300 hardly there was 300 R in the first place instead of mucking up what I believe is the very clean looking aesthetic of this one this is taped on as well for very good reason because there you go more sound dampening material more magnetic fan filters and the option to mount either 120 or 140 140 millimeter fans or what appears to be like a single and that must be a single 160 Miller something like that you guys love to just correct me if I'm wrong on that one but either way if I was gonna mount something here I'd probably go with the the dual dual 140 is just because if the theme is silenced then you want to make sure that you are optimizing the build for silence which means what I would actually do is I would just leave this on because I like the I like the stock configuration of the case okay keeping with their tool-less overall philosophy they have brought back the rear buttons so we had those side clips on the 600 t that wouldn't have really fit with the clean look of this case so we use the rear button in order to release the top panel you can see lots of thick sound dampening material on the inside of the case that is once again going to reduce the noise passed to the user I don't know how many times I can say it about a silent plant case but it's designed to be quiet again other side panel covered in sound dampening material it's great the cases are coming with this now because I remember it wasn't that long ago you had to just buy a case and then you'd buy like sound dampening kits and they were like 50 bucks or like a hundred bucks so now they're just yeah we'll just throw it in the case and call it a day and personally as an end user I appreciate that because it saves me money on the inside of the case we find the usual staples for Corsair nice big CPU cutout so no matter where your CPU socket happens to be you'll be able to install your backplate and all that good stuff from the back black internal cables and little things like this so this is going to around coarser doesn't want it to scratch stuff so they go ahead and they put some foamy plasticy stuff on there for you and take care of that all-black internal cables very very clean looking all black interior hard drive mounting is done in the form of sleds so you can either mount your three and a half inch drives with no tools whatsoever just using these little tins right here oh and these are rubber now - those are nice actually makes anti-vibration thing going on and you have the option to either mount your drive in the middle if you mount a two and a half inch SSD or on the side that's kind of cool are they giving you the option okay supports up to four or five and a quarter inch bays up to six either 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives you can completely remove and I'm gonna need my screwdriver which happens to be right here you can completely remove this middle lunch should you have the desire I mean maybe you want to I don't know install something like like really long graphics cards or something I don't know but hey okay hold on wait for it give me a sec you know guys I'm gonna have to figure this out remove there was just one more screw in the back so you can actually remove both pages if you want although you wouldn't really have too many options in terms of installing drives but there you go you can should you so desire if you just want like more airflow directly onto your graphics card and you just want to you know bolt an SSD somewhere and call it a day in terms of your your boot drive so let's go ahead and throw that back in there cuz I think we're done with that experiment umm right cable routing so once again introduced with the 800 d these awesome rubber grommet ii things that allow you to easily now whoops everything you want wherever you want it to go with nice tidy looking cabling plenty of room at the back so you can see the motherboard tray is a little bit recessed but there's tons of room here to mount your 24 pin cable and whatever other thick cables lots and lots and lots of room in the back and more than enough of these little hooks which are very actually I would say wouldn't say more than enough I could - truffle up here so I can get that up to the eight pin or four pin a hole right here and make it nice and tidy but we have sort of enough then let's say of these hooks for zap-zap strapping cables down to make sure that they're nice and clean on the back so you don't have a hard time closing the back of the case let's have a look at what they've included in terms of accessories whatnots course it's taped shut lots of stuff check it out okay so the internal USB three header is not necessarily compatible with older boards so they've given you an adapter to plug into a USB 2 header should be so desired alright the new boy oh oh replacement clips for the for the front if you happen to like break them or something I guess you know what I better check yep that's what they are so just in case you do happen to break them that saw included for you that's the fan screws we got some hard drive screws no those on hard drive screws those are vibration dampening fan screws more fans crews hard drive screws power supply screws optical and SSD screws and motherboard standoffs there's also of course the manual really in design inside and out I think that pretty much speaks for itself when it comes to course there's limited track record with cases but it's been very very good so far and I think that pretty much covers it so thank you for checking out our unboxing your first look at the Corsair 550d don't forget to subscribe to grips - 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