Corsair Obsidian 900D Ultimate Enthusiast Case Feat. George Makris - Linus Tech Tips CES 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,539 words · ~12 min read
0:01
welcome to the Corsair showcase at CES 2013 guys I have with me today the man
0:08
you guys are a fan of this man whether you know it or not this is George Maus
0:12
from Corsair he is the the The
0:15
Mastermind behind the 800d and pretty much every case that's followed it so
0:20
he's the guy who's responsible for their cases basically just rocking the house
0:25
and this right here is the house that every other case rocked inside
0:30
tell us about the 900d super Tower pck
0:34
welcome to Linus Tech tips at CES 2013 our trip to the show this year is
0:38
powered by Corsair maker of quality PC components and peripherals our trusted
0:42
storage partner is Seagate technology and our trusted networking partner is
0:51
linkis all right well uh when we launched 800d about 3 years ago three
0:55
and a half years ago uh we got a lot of people really interested it was our
0:58
first case and we made a lot of changes that everyone of like so like rubber grommets and cable routing stuff things
1:02
like that people really dug um but then you know if you're any kind of a a
1:07
creative person or perfectionist at all all you see on like forums is the
1:11
criticisms like the the Thousand guys who love it that's fine that's great but
1:14
the like two guys who are like oh it's you know it should have more radiator
1:17
space or or whatever so since we launched that I've been like keep
1:20
keeping a mental checklist of the things that I wanted to fix based on like
1:24
people that said online like oh it should have more radiator space or it should be a little bit bigger or
1:28
whatever and so that's what this is is basically let's it's a hey I've listened
1:32
to it I fixed it these are all the really cool things you guys wanted and
1:36
then some other stuff we thought of that maybe you didn't know you wanted um so
1:39
first off uh the first complaint a lot of people said well you know it's only
1:42
got seven or eight slots we put 10 slots here so you can put a bigger uh
1:46
motherboard in it fits hptx motherboards like the SRX or any dual processor board
1:51
uh still got the standard cable routing stuff with even more space behind it um
1:55
it's got room for a 480 or a 420 up top
1:59
and then down here if you take these cages out you can put another 480 or 420
2:03
on this side um or you can put a dual power supply in here with that power
2:07
supply installed you can actually put a 240 or 280 on that side um as well as
2:12
the 480 or 420 over here okay so hold on a minute I'm going to stop you here for
2:16
a minute because I think we need to clarify this point I can put a 480 in
2:19
the top a 240 here and a 480 here and
2:24
probably one back here yeah and on the front you can do a 240 or 360 also so
2:29
and that is that's all Native you don't have to drill any holes or anything like that so
2:33
it's all taken care of for you um it's a little bit goofy but we kind
2:39
of I don't really expect too many people to load up every spot with radiator
2:42
spacing someone will but well yeah there's going to be someone I know who did because we did it we're doing a
2:46
photo of it but there's going to be guys who wanted maybe to put a 480 but they
2:50
don't necessarily want to put it up top they want to put it on the bottom or maybe two guys want you know I want to
2:53
put 3 240s in my case but I want to choose where I put them so this gives
2:57
them that flexibility so kind of my mindset is let's give people the
3:00
flexibility to do a bunch of different different things and see how they do it
3:04
and like give them that that chance and I don't like mandating how you do stuff
3:09
so that's what this case is really designed to do well that's one of the things that made the 800d so special was
3:14
that there was one way to do it that was really really good yeah whereas what
3:18
we're doing with the 900d then is is taking it to the next level kind of so
3:22
for example we had a hot swap B on the 800d that was front accessible um a lot
3:26
of people liked that some people say they didn't care about it but a lot of
3:29
people did like the of hot swapping drives so we still have one of these
3:32
cages has hot swap connectors on the back of it so you can do three hot Swap
3:35
aays and they're really easy access so you can just pop this open pull this out
3:40
and you take your drive out and put it back in um unlike the the 800d the hot
3:45
swap Drive trays are toolfree now so you don't have to screw the drives in like
3:48
you did on the 800d so that's even better um the other side is that hot
3:52
swap is relocatable so if you don't want it down here and you want to put it up here instead you can remove it and move
3:56
it around um and the water cooling guys a love that because now they have just a
4:02
ton of options yeah exactly and then the other thing we did is on these cages uh
4:06
you have the airf flow in the front from the front 320s that are there by default
4:10
but each cage has fan mounts on the back so you can do push pull on your hard
4:13
drive cage as well so you can keep better airf flow across right there
4:18
guys so we've done that on some of our smaller cases like the C70 or the 400r
4:23
500 R but this takes it kind of let's take those features that people really
4:26
liked about those cases and put them up in our flagship so that was one of the
4:30
things that was kind of funny as you sat down and wrote a feature list out
4:34
sometimes like the 400 R 500 R had better features than like the 800d it
4:37
had eight full slots which the 800d didn't have it had seven and kind of an
4:41
eighth slot that was a dongle slot but this is designed to be kind of okay
4:45
let's take all that cool stuff and add it up to the next level and make it more ridiculous do you want to show us the
4:49
front of the case yeah let's show over here real quick so you get the nice
4:53
aluminum fascia still um this is a cast aluminum surround it's a complete piece
4:57
of cast aluminum it's done for structal rigidity and a little bit of weight
5:01
savings over steel um if we had done this out of plastic it would have been a
5:05
little bit cheaper but it wouldn't have been anywhere near as rigid and I think
5:08
if you see a lot of cases that are plastic and steel they have a lot of
5:11
flex to them because especially full Tow and bigger because you really need that
5:15
rigidity of of heavy metal at that time so on the front you have a floating
5:19
bezel that just pops right off like a speaker Grill would so you have these
5:23
four mounts here and then just like the the 600t or 650d you just have the
5:29
removable dust filter on the front so you can really easily access that so
5:34
it's a pretty easy setup um by default this case will come with 31 120s in the
5:38
front and a 140 in the back uh for cooling and it's got really good air
5:42
cooling performance as well which is the other thing people with the 800d said
5:45
you know it's great for water cooling but I want to air cool my system for a while and you know if I put two or three
5:50
gpus in there it's kind of hard to get good cooling on that this Pro this case
5:53
doesn't have that problem now those don't appear to be standard 5 and a/4
5:57
inch uh Bays up there so these are these are bigger than 5 and
6:03
a/4 inch bays and we did it because not many people are using optical drives
6:07
anymore um so we figured okay you know for the width of the case and the look
6:11
of the case we had to get something that was able to hold those dries if you
6:15
wanted them but not necessarily kind of the same thing so this pops out and you
6:21
get a bezel let's see if I can get this to work here a sec again like I said
6:25
it's a prototype so so this pops out and
6:28
it gives you we've textured this and made this look pretty nice and when you
6:31
put a drive here or a drive here or a drive here they look pretty good but
6:35
yeah you will notice it's not the same width as the rest of the case so you
6:39
know this is one of those things that I think that people immediately the
6:42
modders and stuff are going to find ways to stealth this piece so they get a
6:45
stealth optical drive or a stealth fan controller and like I said this is
6:49
toolfree but that's optional you can just put screws in it and and go to town
6:52
on it however you like this is going to be one of those things people are going to mod yeah that's uh that's actually
6:58
that's fantastic I mean to ify I don't think George believes that few people
7:02
use Optical drives but few people buying a case of this caliber need an optical
7:06
drive anymore I don't have I haven't had an optical drive in quite a while in my
7:09
case and uh to be honest I don't really miss it so everything I you know install
7:14
a game it's off steam or whatever so I haven't I haven't actually purchased
7:17
software on CD for probably two or three years so lots of front IO yeah there's
7:24
uh two USB 3 and four USB 2s on there um
7:28
we didn't want to add stuff like a lot of cases have fan controllers or like a
7:32
card read or something like that that adds cost to the case and to be honest
7:36
whatever we put in there wouldn't be the best in the world if you want if you're
7:39
going to buy a $350 case my guess is you probably also did a lot of research on
7:43
your fan controller and care very deeply about what fan controller you buy and
7:46
whatever fan controller I put in there you guys wouldn't find is good enough
7:49
and if I did put the best fan controller in the world in there it would cost me an extra $ 20 or $30 to do a really nice
7:54
DC fan control method thing and I don't know that you would want to pay 380 or
7:58
390 or 400 bucks for that cuz it has fan control over it so my guess is I'll give
8:02
you guys the freedom to put whatever card reader or fan control you guys want
8:06
and keep the cost out of it so this case is only $50 more than 800d it's 350
8:10
instead of 300 and the reason we were able to get to that so reasonably with
8:13
adding all the size and all the features is because we took out like fan control
8:17
and some of the other stuff and the hot swap a is a lot less expensive version
8:20
so the old 800d had kind of a server hot swap a we just stuck in there this is a
8:24
much more userfriendly and actually more compatible version than you guys will
8:28
see so Cable Management wise do you have just as much room behind the motherboard
8:32
tray or is it even more than the 800d it's a lot more than 800d so this is
8:36
about an inch and a quar depending on what area you're in so you actually have
8:39
room to fit more like I mean I don't have the world I don't have the world's
8:43
smallest fingers and I can get my hand back there pretty easily so okay here
8:46
let's let's get a good let's get a good shot of that there we
8:51
go very very nice so it's it's a it's a lot of space back there and we took the
8:56
if if you've ever seen the back of our C70 we have these plastic latches for
8:59
cable tie down we have three of those back here too but we made them a little
9:03
bit bigger a little bit more robust and A Little Bit Stronger for the more cables that the guys who have a case
9:07
like this would have so almost everybody who buys a $350 case would have SLI or
9:11
something like that and this we know that you're going to have more cables
9:14
and as you can see with the power spay here the cables go up underneath that motherboard tray through a a cable ring
9:19
cutout that's down there so you can just kind of stealth it and go straight up so
9:22
it's a pretty nice way to restrict that all right well I think that covers it
9:27
pretty much as well as anyone could thank you very much George guys uh don't
9:31
forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips so you can check out all of our CES 2013
9:35
coverage and guys leave a comment for George under the video to show your
9:39
appreciation for his hard work and the way he has ACT no I'm I'm serious man no
9:43
I'll be reading those comments and like looking for you guys to say mean things about me and it's always nice it's I
9:48
love the internet like 90% of you guys are totally cool and like the other 10%
9:51
are like you know you know click this if you liked Corsair and there's a thousand
9:55
thumbs up under the inen video and the next one makes a bad comment about my
9:59
hairy so I love you guys thanks
10:03
guys thanks for watching lonus Tech tips at CES 2013 powered by Corsair Seagate
10:09
technology and linkis