First Look: Corsair Obsidian 800D

What's inside?

Inside the lovely all black design continues and Corsair has gone down the compartmentalising route separating bottom area for PSU and a few hard drives from the main motherboard and optical drive area above.

The cabling is designed to be hidden entirely behind the motherboard tray to not hinder airflow and to look neater, hence all the rubber covered holes. There's no place for a PSU in the roof, with the space dedicated to airflow above the CPU socket, and there's a good few inch gap above the top of the motherboard as well allowing plenty of space for very large heatsinks or elaborate cooling setups.

Down the front though Corsair seems to have lost the plot a little. What's with the rubbish plastic covers? Not only do they don't hold in at all, they are only there for simplified aesthetic reasons only one out of four is entirely for airflow direction and not just aesthetics. There's one covering the PCBs as well which we didn't photograph because, quite simply, it wouldn't stay in.

Why bother covering the PCB when we'll have a motherboard and at least one graphics card in the case anyway? In addition, notice the orientation of the fan and compare that to the side panel. There aren't any blow holes in the side panel, so it begs the question where does it draw air from to cool the hard drives?


It's anyone's guess, but apparently it's meant to suck air up from the base by some convoluted spaghetti route, however it'll be competing with air being drawn up into the motherboard area by the other 140mm fan in the base of the middle panel as well.

There's another bit of plastic in the bottom too that slides out but we can only allude is to aid the direction of airflow upwards, while no interfering with the airflow of the bottom hard drives. That is, if you can get to the bottom 3.5in drive area. It's immoveable and to use all of them requires the fan removal too. The drives go in with rails that should help a bit but to cool them there's space for another side mounted fan that has no means of getting air, we think, and we'll be sure to test in the full review.

In all there are three 140mm fans provided with space for three more 120mm in the roof, and another over the bottom hard drives.


Despite the initial love of the design - the colour and the cable tidying, the whole area is over-thought and appears basked in compromise. Clearly Corsair didn't want to drill obvious holes in its lovely clean case panels for ventilation, which we can appreciate, so it had to try and expect fans to attempt the improbable and compete against each other. No side fan. No grills.

Addendum 27th July 2009: Corsair contest our opinion here and state the hard drives receive ample airflow. We will endeavor to test the theory and contrasting opinion when we fully review the case.