Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 Review

Interior

The interior is roomy and has an emphasis on cable routing and offering as many fan mounts as possible. Corsair has ditched the 5.25in bays from the Air 540, and removed the bottom 3.5in mounts from bottom of the motherboard chamber too, freeing up the base for a trio of 120mm fans or pair of 140mm fans.


Three 140mm fans are included as standard - two in the front and one in the rear, and hopefully yours would be intact, unlike one of our intake fans, although it still span up as normal for testing. They're fairly quiet at full speed and will be drowned out by most graphics cards and CPU coolers, but they do shift a good amount of air. Combined with the generous use of mesh to allow unimpeded airflow, we suspect the case will do quite well in the cooling department.


There's lots of cooling potential too, with options to house a 360mm or 280mm radiator in the front of the case with essentially no height limit depending on how much your graphics card eats into the 370mm of clearance to the front fans, that is. There's also room for a 240mm/280mm radiator in the roof, and again there's a good deal of clearance here for at least a 45mm-thick radiator and single row of fans before you even approach the top of the motherboard.


The front of the case has a large removable dust filter with a magnetic filter for the PSU on the far panel too. There's a huge CPU area cut-out and all of the panels are removable as well, sporting metal mounting points rather than plastic ones, so they should be much more durable than we've seen in the past. This makes installing your water-cooling gear a much less fiddly task than it would otherwise be. That said, installing other water-cooling components in the main chamber isn't as straightforward as it would be in many modern cases that include dedicated pump and reservoir mounts and this seems a bit short-sighted from Corsair given how clearly geared towards water-cooling the Air 740 is.


Cable routing is superb, though, with anchor points, holes and rubber grommets bristling all over the motherboard tray, although you only get a handful of plastic cable ties - we'd like to have seen something more elaborate such as Velcro ties at this price. Storage is well catered for so long as you're not looking to house more than a couple of hard disks - there are three tool-free 3.5in/2.5in trays in a cage in the rear chamber and SSDs get their own individual tool-free trays that clip together individually so you can remove the ones you don't need, although doing so doesn't really offer any advantage. They didn't seem to house our SSD as snuggly as other Corsair tool-free mounts have either.