This video is brought to you by the Corsair Obsidian 350D MicroATX case.
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to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Corsair 350D. Now,
Corsair initially launched their case line with an Obsidian case. That was an
ATX case, a very large one I might add, the 800D. 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 microATX 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 800D. 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 ASUS's
Gan series which have been available for a couple generations now, there's really
no reason why you can't put exactly as much cooling and exactly as much
performance on a microATX system as you can on an ATX system. So, once I
actually figure out how to get the box open here. See, you can see my thumb is
ah jammed in there trying to get the 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 general details about the overall specs,
flexible cooling options. comes with one 140mm intake fan, 120 mm exhaust fan.
There are five mounts total. The front and top mounts are spaced for 240 mm
radiators for more cooling options. That's what Corsair's done well is
they've really integrated liquid cooling options well with their cases. Not only
accommodating for their own products, which are usually sort of pre-filled
all-in-one units, but also for custom
liquid cooling. 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 it's 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 rant there. Corsair doesn't do this, particularly
looking at their most recent cases like the 350D as well as the 900D. 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 did the necessary drop tests, like there are standards for this uh
crush testing and all that kind of stuff before bringing the 350D to market
because they've been generally pretty good about packaging. Overall, having
worked at an online retailer uh in Canada where shipping can often result
in things dying, very horrible deaths. It 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 size of the window isn't overly huge. Um, 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 gamey looking. Uh, on the front you can see this front plate did seem to
Oh, that came loose, didn't it? 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 on the
metal front plate. Hopefully you guys can see that. Very small uh 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. All right. So, no actual damage
done to the case, which is wonderful. Uh, we've got a removable fan filter
here in the front. So, in the front, you can either mount a single 140 mm fan or
you can do dual 120 mm fans. You can actually see there are alternate
mounting points here, here, here, and
here. Okay, I get it now. So, I'm going to put this on. I hate touching these
because it's going to stain. Ah. Uh, 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 Corsair's 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 out. So, it can accommodate a
single 140 mm 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 fan, it goes right directly into
the chassis. However, you have the option with the included mounting holes
here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Anyway, all over the place to
mount dual 120s or even dual 140 mm fans
in the front of the case. the 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, oh right, so two five and a
quarter inch bays, uh headphone, microphone, and reset switches here,
power switch up here, two USB 3.0 super
speeds, and then yeah, two 5 and 1/4 in bay. So there that takes care of the
front. On the top you've got that same flexibility. So, dual 120 mil or dual
140 mm. And check this out. In order to account for the fact that sometimes the
spacing isn't exact on certain um liquid
coolers or whatever else, they've expanded the holes for one of the 140 mm
mounts. So, you can change the spacing a little bit if you want. That's uh that's
actually a really nice touch as well. It goes to show you Corsair 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. It 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 that sits on. That's kind of nice.
Uh 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 MATX 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 microATX platform is that you can't have
two dual slot graphics cards running an SLR or Crossfire and have a high-end
audio card or something like that. So that's really cool to see as well. 120
mm cooling fan in the back, liquid cooling holes, which of course are
wisely left in because most people won't be using those, as well as standard
power supply mounting. All right, 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
class case. looking at cases like the 800D and the 650D in terms of the
construction. So, there's a little bit of flex here. Um, as you guys can see, I
mean, we expect this on a windowed side panel, but quite honestly, when I
wrapped on the other side panel, um, it
wasn't really all that awe 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 800D, but it's also not priced like an 800D, so there's sort of
something to consider. All right. So once we get inside, we've got two 3 and
1/2 in sliding hard drive cages. Now these are usually flimsy, but once you
actually put a drive in them, they stiffen right up and so you can slide
those back in there. This whole cage comes out. Love the use of screws for
the construction instead of using rivets. So those there's those screws on
the bottom as well as right here. Screws
on the back. This gives you the flexibility. See, one, two, looks like
just two screws on this side here. This gives you the flexibility to remove the
whole thing, including these 2 and 1/2 in 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/4 in bays. Up here in the bottom, they've of course
got 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 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 eight pin or your four pin. One
up here for whatever you might need to run to the very top right hand edge of
your board. Um, maybe they want you to use it for routing the front IO or
something like that behind the motherboard tray. And then ones 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 Oh, check that out. So, that's how this comes out. There you go.
There's your 2 and 12 in drive mount. So, these are awesome. Hey, Slick, can you throw me an SSD? Uh, preferably
Corsair. See, now I'm putting that now I'm
putting the pressure on him. There we go. Aha. Corsair 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. Springloaded, too. So, when you open it
up, it pops it out for you. So, 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 the
300R. 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. Corsair, of course, always with the nice little touches. I
mean, it's all about spending money in the right places. spend money making
that OEM 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 that 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 a US
I'd like to see someone implement a less bulky USB3 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 bit is
blue. You can still see it. You can still see it coming out. Um included
little bits here.
So you got fan screws. That's good. You got some other more different screws.
You got some uh zip ties and all that kind of stuff. Um, 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.
Corsair, if you're watching this, keep doing this. I like this. I appreciate
this. There's a toolless 5 and a/4 in bay, but as usual, you don't have to use
it toollessly. 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? Um, 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
it's 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 online as tech tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.