Interior

The tempered glass panel has the standard black trim around the edge and no smoked or tinted effect. It's mounted using four screws as usual, but these require an Allen key (supplied)  rather than your thumb – we’d argue there aren’t enough benefits aesthetically for this to justify the inconvenience. And inconvenient they are - not only do they require a specific tool to open, but the panel does not rest on any rubber mounts like it normally would, so it falls away immediately whenever you undo the last screw or try to reattach it. It makes getting the panel back on genuinely annoying, so if you're a frequent tinkerer we'd suggest looking elsewhere. The opposite side panel does use a few notches that will need aligning, but at least its thumbscrews are captive.

Internally, we have a very safe design that ticks most of the boxes for current trends. PSU shroud? Check. Full-length motherboard tray to hide cables and drives? Check. Clear airflow path from front to back as a result? You bet. And there's even a pair of expansion brackets fixed vertically to allow GPUs to be shown off through the window. That said, the bracket and cable you'll need for this are not yet sold by Corsair.

Looking closer, we see some nice touches such as a full set of pre-installed motherboard mounts including a lengthened central one to help with mounting boards vertically, but also some indications of the 275R's budget leanings such as the PSU resting on foam pads and not rubber ones and the absence of thumbscrews on the PCI brackets.

As usual, 3.5” hard drives are relegated to beneath the PSU shroud into a two-bay cage. The sleds for this are basic plastic affairs with no silicon around the tool-free mounting pins. These trays can also house 2.5” drives, but there are four further dedicated positions where those can also be positioned. You have two independently removable steel trays behind the motherboard, each with a nifty captive thumbscrew, and two mounting positions integrated into the very front of the extended motherboard tray.

When it comes to liquid-cooling, the focus of the 275R is all-in-one support, which makes sense give the price point it occupies and Corsair’s investment in this field. The front supports 360mm and 280mm radiators, while the roof has room for a 240mm model, and here the elongated mounting struts are helpfully offset to help avoid conflicts with VRM heatsinks and memory modules. Even so, you’re unlikely to fit anything other than a slimline radiator with a single row of fans, and the same is true up front where the PSU shroud is a limiting factor. The front HDD cage is removable via five screws, which could potentially open up a place to mount a pump, but as we said the focus is all-in-one cooling here.

The case’s internal cables are all blacked out for minimum visibility (at least in the black version). When it comes to routing them, Corsair has holes positioned above, below, and to the side of the motherboard, and of course you can stuff excess lengths into the lower compartment. The larger holes, including one cut into the PSU shroud, are protected with rubber grommets. You don’t get any Velcro cables ties, and space behind the motherboard tray feels a bit tight, but in the end we didn’t have many problems tidying our cables up.