Well we say in the remake of the company a while ago in the planning’s on a intro of their SSD drives to the market as all of the memory producers a looking and taking at. But never in the sake of aluminium is fun with cases or in the gaming sector that. In 1994 Corsair emerged as a Performance Memory Manufacturer forging their way with innovative performance products making Corsair the brand we know and trust today. In the last few years Corsair have broadened their horizons venturing in to making power supplies as well. The team at OC3D are all in agreement that at the time of writing the best PSU’s available today are made by Corsair see the HX850w review here. Still not happy Corsair have made budget all in one water cooling unit the H50 which trades punches both in performance and price with the T.R.U.E and has split opinions down the middle.
Well the naming of the product Obsidian 800D is a little out of the picture of the demographics of naming a case, we might have some disagreements of the naming but if it hits the spot for users around the place to find something interesting, that definitely did it right. The first thing that hit me was the size of the box that arrived, it is much taller and deeper than I was expecting. I nearly got a hernia trying to pick it up its that heavy, I did think for a second or two there was a pre-built PC inside! So straight away the weight of the ABS steel chassis is having an effect.
Theres quite a lot to get through, so Ill start at the top. The top 5.25″ bay houses the power switch and activity light. It also has a drop down panel to expose the reset switch, headphone and microphone connections, Firewire and 4x USB ports. The drop down panel has a very slow quality action to it, I think I must have played with this in a daze for about 10 minutes before I realised how much of a nerd Ive turn into when front panels become so fascinating.
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.