Corsair Obsidian 800D

 

You can not deny that this is a good looking well built case, it may be steel but that just adds to the tough sturdy quality feel. The attention to detail is also the best Ive seen in any case on the market, even simple things like the front I/O bay kept me amused for ages playing with the pop down door. The case is also much bigger than I’d have ever expected, and this made installing even a full high end system easy with plenty of room to move around and fit the parts with out having to be some kind of Japanese contortionist.

 

When it came to testing it became apparent very quickly that the case was suffocating, there just wasn’t enough cool air getting into the case to cool the parts. GPU’s rely on cool air blowing over them to help keep the volcano of heat inside cool. The only intake was from the bottom blowing up wards, which in the Silverstone Raven with the GPU mounted vertically this works very well, but in the Corsair the cool air (what there is of it) completely misses the GPU’s all together and the temperatures reflect this. Ill admit I’m no F1 aerodynamics expert, but surely if its so obvious to me what the problem is how did this case get this far, its a bit late to be changing things now. After a simple fan change and a slight rethink of the airflow pattern to get more air into the case the temperatures plummeted, there definitely wasn’t enough air getting into the case but I think that its 50% design flaw and 50% that the fans provided were designed to be quiet rather than actually move much air. Once the changes were made the case performed much better against the ‘High Air Flow’ 922.

 

So for £229.99 you get a very tough and well designed case, thats going to look very sleek on any ones desk. But be prepared to spend another £20-£30 buying different fans if you are planning on running an air cooled system inside. I really think this case was designed all along to be a water cooled case with the H50 in the back of the case pulling cool air in because then as the tests have shown it performs much better.

 

 

 

– Very tough

– Designed to last

– Sleek sexy looks

– Masses of room

– Very good cable management

– Native 15mm fan spacing radiator support

 

– Bottom hard drives go in from the front

– No cable tie mounts on back of motherboard tray

 

– Stock Fans don’t not move enough air

– Needs more/better intake fans