Corsair Carbide Series 330R Review

Corsair Carbide Series 330R - Interior

Inside the case you'll find a massive cutout on the motherboard tray for installing big coolers, as well as a single pre-fixed mount in the middle to hold your motherboard steady while you screw it into place. There are also thumbscrews on the PCI brackets, meaning they can be reused easily, although there's no padding or noise damping material around the PSU, which is strange in a low noise case.


Optical drives slide in easily from the front once you've removed the bay covers, with a single clip automatically locking them into place. It's a simple solution but the drives are only held in place at one point, so it's not a very secure one. That said, screws are provided so you can always use them instead.

As for the internal drives, it may look like there's a drive cage missing, but there's actually just a single lower drive cage included. This has the benefit of leaving lots of available space for long graphics cards and giving the airflow from the front fan a clear path into the case. However, the same can be said of a removable drive cage, which naturally also gives you the option to install more drives.


With the drive bay arrangement as it is, you're limited to just four internal drives of any size. While this may be fine for many, especially for those not looking to break the bank when buying a case, it's still a small amount and one that limits your future storage upgrades. It even looks like the metal section behind the intake fan is designed to allow drive bays to slide in, so the absence of an extra cage is even stranger and leaves the area where it should be feeling like wasted space. The small SSD drive cage from the 200R has also been lost, although in fairness this did partially block airflow from the front.

The lack of a lower fan mount leaves another space that can't be used for anything on the floor of the case. Cases like the similarly priced Fractal R4, for example, often allow you to move the lower drive cage back to fill this area, making room for water-cooling radiators at the front, but as the 330R's drive cage is fixed, this can't be done. However, there's space in the roof for slimline 240mm and 280mm radiator set-ups, so most closed loop coolers will have no trouble fitting inside.


The individual drive cages are plastic and rather easy to bend, although this does mean they're easy to fit around 3.5-inch drives. You'll also find rubber around the pins to soften vibrations, and the pins themselves are secured well such that they won't push out of place. They don't fit all that securely into their bays, however, even with a hard drive installed to make them a bit more rigid.

For a £75 chassis, it's a shame to note that there aren't any rubber grommets around the cable routing holes, but the actual holes are well sized, including the one for the EPS12V connection. Even with the foam on the panel, there's a healthy amount of room for cables too, and a small number of bridges and zip ties are provided to keep everything in its place, and we had no real issues keeping things tidy.