welcome to my unboxing of the Corsair carbide series 300r 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 because it's 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 R is a compact expression of the
Corsair philosophy great systems begin with a great case um open the easy
access side panel to find a builder friendly design with three toolfree optical drive bays and four toolfree
hard drive Bays with integrated 2.5 in SSD compatibility there's room for extra
long graphics cards and it keeps your Hardware cool with amazing air flow including 140 mm front fan 120 mm rear
fan which should be compatible with the h8 as well okay and dust filters are
removable for features much like this make the foundation of your next system okay 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 it 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 almost
anywhere else just because of the size of this country and uh 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 quick start
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 uh yeah I'm going to show you guys
why I like that so much and it's going to involve me moving this computer which
has my cat perched on it and then moving my backpack which is in the way of this
door in here so no no you don't to follow me in here I'm just going to
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 this side panel are fingerprints can you see that can you see the
blemishes in the Finish yeah you can kind of you could kind of see it there
in 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 in your fingers etch into that
anodized brushed aluminum finish and you cannot completely clean it so I love
this plastic brush thing it's 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 not
enough let's keep going I love the industrial look of 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 uh
these bolt things going on here we've got three 5 and 1/4 in Bays power and
reset switches headphones and microphone two USB 3.0 ports and then we have a
front thing which I'm not 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 uh at
the Corsair Suite so pardon me for uh
for my ignorance here 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 that's uh 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 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
uh pieces for the panels Corsair has gone with these pronged metal pieces and
I don't know if you guys noticed but in my unboxing of the 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 and answers a question or like addresses a concern
that I sort of had about cases in general because I've never seen this
before uh before I even had a chance to talk to anyone about it so that's really
cool Kudos Corsair way to go so dual
120s or 140s it comes with 140 mm 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 uh 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 120s or 140s 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 once again a pretty run-of-the-mill design um so
we've got our 120 mm exhaust with oh this is interesting so they've bulged
out the 120 mm grill a little bit to give you a bit more room between the
back of the fan and the grill this not only reduces the turbulence and
increases the air flow 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
12s or dual 140s would have preferred to
see the 20 centered and seen a couple more holes put in it just so that uh if
you're running a radiator such as an h100 you would be able to have that
radiator centered because you can see it and um hold on a second I just got to
throw this mouse for my cat who is bothering my filming
assistant all right there we go let's put the front back on before we get too
much further here cuz I do want you to guys to uh I want you guys to appreciate
the case the case is finished design rather than just you know with me having
torn it apart already more ventilation here on the sides so that is how those
front 140 mm 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 let's take off
those thumb screws the 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 800d which are obviously very very highgrade cases let 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 uh every time
the C 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 that 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 uh 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 cutout here maybe on a
like a revision you know 1.1 or something like that because some
motherboards 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 H 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 squeeze it in there all right what else we got on the back this can uh this can serve as routing for
your front panel audio cuz most motherboards have that located over
there although you might have to cheat a little bit and push your push it through
before you put the power supply in stuff like that and I think that covers it for
this side of the case yes it does okay let's flip it
around here so here's our tooless 5 and 1/4 in base here is the the enormous
space that we have in this case accommodating up to 4 50 mm 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 3 and 1/2 in or 2 and 1/2 in
hard drive mounts so there are the 2 and 1/2 in 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 so let's have a look at 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 800d comes with cables
for the hot Swap and stuff like that but this doesn't really have that uh 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 140s
in the front you got your dual 140s up here you got your 120 back here you got
your 120 built into the power supply here this is a very very capable case
and Corsair 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 3 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 sub1 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 uh kudos to Corsair on this one so thank
you for checking out this unboxing and first look at the Corsair 300r don't
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