titleIt wasn’t that long ago that I took an in depth look at Corsair's Special Edition white version of their 600T. I was extremely impressed with the entire case. Because of that I thought we would backtrack a little bit and take a look at what started it all, Corsair's 800D from the Obsidian Series of cases. Being their flagship model it’s clear that it still has a lot to offer, lets dig in (finally) and see what  all of the fuss is about.

Product Name: Corsair Obsidian Series 800D

Review Sample Provided by: Corsair

Review by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

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Specifications

Warranty

Two years

Dimension

24" (H) x 24" (L) x 9" (W) - (609mm X 609mm X 229 mm)

MB Support

ATX, EATX, mATX

Expansion Slots

7

Form Factor

Full-tower

Material

Aluminum Faceplate, Steel Structure

Drive Bays

(x5) 5.25"" (x4) 3.5"" SATA Hot Swappable (x2) 3.5"" Internal

Cooling

(x3) 140mm Fans Up to 4x 120mm Fans (not included)

Front I/O

(x4) USB 2.0 (x1) IEEE1394 (x1) Headphone, (x1) MIC

Power Supply

ATX (not included)




Packaging

Following Corsairs normal packaging design the front of the package shows the series on the left side along with the model number on the right in large letters (800D). Above the name and series is a large photo of the 800D that takes up most of the packaging and gives you a nice view of the front, side, and some of the inside of the 800D. The box comes in at a whopping 28 inches tall; this is obviously not a mini ITX case, lol.

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Tucked away on the side are a few small photos of the case along with a full breakdown of its specifications.

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Around back there is another large photo of the 800D like on the front but this time around it’s a picture of the inside. Under it you have nine different photos of different features of the 800D along with short descriptions in multiple languages under each of the photos.

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Inside the entire case is wrapped in a plastic bag and then protected with Styrofoam on each end.

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The last line of defense that Corsair put into place was the plastic coating on the entire front of the case along with the inside and outside of the side panel window. Considering the plastic bag was also used this was an interesting choice, but it’s nice to see that they are concerned about scratches and fingerprints during manufacturing and shipping.

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Exterior Breakdown

The 800D comes in at a 24 inches tall, 24 inches deep, and 9 inches wide; there is no doubt that this is a big case. The exterior of the 800D is simple and elegant. Corsair’s design is very boxy and similar in some ways to a Lian Li design. Where Corsair has set itself apart is with their attention to detail. From this view we can see the left side panel and its sail-shaped side window. This window design is unique yet still simple enough not to be distracting or overwhelming.

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Around front you have five 5¼" drive bays, the power button on the top left, and a large door below the drive bays (we will see what is behind it soon). The entire front is one solid piece of aluminum in a black color to match the rest of the case. Down towards the bottom the Corsair logo in white really pops against the black.

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Here we can see behind the spring loaded door on the front we have found 3 inch hot swap bays

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Each of the bays has a small lock and latch holding them in place. Once unlocked the latch pops out and you can pull the drive bay out.

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Here is a look at the hot-swap drive bay. You can see mounting points for both 3½ inch hard drives and the smaller 2½ inch hard drives and SSD’s. There are noticeably no rubber vibration dampeners on this design. I would also love to see this design be tool-less, similar to some of ICY-Dock designs. Swapping out drives is nice, but it’s not very convenient if you have to find your spare screws and a screwdriver each time you do it.

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Next to the power button on the top front you have a small spring loaded door that hides the front I/O panel, keeping the clean look of the 800D. Our I/O panel includes the USB 3.0 connections that Corsair upgraded the 800D to recently. We have a total of two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, a Firewire port, both microphone and headphone connections, and a small reset button just in case you need to abort mid-game. You can also see in this photo how easy the aluminum design picked up greasy finger prints. We literally had just taken this out of the plastic and already had one. That’s the last time we scarf down chips mid-review.

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Here is a better view of the side panel window. This gives you a good idea of what components will be seen with the side panel on. Considering the strong focus on wire management its almost odd that the window shows the bottom power supply section at all.

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The opposite side has nothing exciting going on at all. Just a plain black side panel.

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Up top you have no plastic like many of the cases available on the market today. In place of the plastic Corsair has included three 140mm fan grills in a slightly recessed area that is the perfect size of a 360mm radiator. The styling is really subtle here, but Corsair was careful not to just make the top perfectly flat with no design at all. The recessed fan area and the indents behind that area both make the top distinguished without going overboard.

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Rather than go with a standard stick-on rubber foot Corsair really helped the 800D stand out with its unique foot design. Along the entire bottom you have three feet that extend from one side to the other. These feet give a nice amount of clearance to get airflow under the case to the power supply, even in a carpeted room.

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Around back you can see the entire back has the same black finish as the rest of the exterior. The configuration has the power supply down at the bottom along with numerous areas that have been vented for extra cooling.

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Up top you have one of the most interesting parts of the case. Two black buttons located on each side of the highest vent. Each button, when pushed, releases the corresponding side panel. We have seen something similar on a few other cases like the Cosmos. But it is still always nice to see a case that doesn’t require thumbscrews to hold the side panels on. This keeps with the slick styling that Corsair was going for.

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Down a little farther you have two holes with grommets in them to help you route your water cooling lines in and out of the case if needed. Below then you have the rear I/O panel with another 140mm fan location. You can see the mounting holes for a 120mm fan if you would want to swap to something different also. This is also a great view of the vent on the far left of this image. Corsair uses this vent as part of its three zone cooling solution, this one being specifically for cooling the hard drives. You may be trying to picture it now, read our interior section for more information.

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For the PCI slots Corsair has included seven. I was hoping to see eight, meaning support for an XL-ATX motherboard so we could put our super-sized Gigabyte Assassin motherboard to use, but that is unfortunately a no-go. You can still fit e-ATX and just about everything else though. Down at the bottom you can see the power supply mounting location, as we mentioned before its all the way at the bottom, a fairly standard location now.

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With the front panel pulled off you can see a few things. Most notably below the four hot swap bays there is a small plastic insert covering up something. With two clips holding it down it was easy to remove.

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With the panel removed you can spot two more drive bay’s for 3½ inch hard drives, just in case you need them. These are not hot swap compatible, but they would be perfect for a pair of SSD’s in raid for your OS drive. You wouldn’t have to worry about pulling the wrong drive out when messing with the hot swap.

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Last but not least, here is a look at the built-in fan filters into the bottom of the case.

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Interior Breakdown

As soon as you take the side panel off its easy to see that Corsair put a considerable amount of thought into every last part on the 800D. They went with a three compartment design, segregating the power supply in the bottom section.

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I also love the inclusion of the two water cooling holes with grommets right next to that cooling fan. I was  a little puzzled why the holes are there until I realized that there are times when your power supply cables are a little too short to route behind the motherboard tray. Both of the holes could be used to run one or two 6 pin cables if needed. You can also hide your water pump in the PSU compartment for a clean looking water cooling setup.

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They used three removable plastic covers to section off both the hot swap hard drives and the bottom mounted hard drives into their own cooling zone. A side-mounted 140mm fan is hidden under one of the covers to push air over the hard drives. The air for this cooling zone is pushed out behind the motherboard tray all the way to the back of the case before exiting. This is a very unique cooling design, I am very curious how well it works.

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It’s easy to spot the location of the hot-swap drives from behind because of the plastic coverings covering both the back and side. The rear slides off first and reveals where you hook up your four SATA connections along with one SATA power connection. It’s nice to see the SATA connection being used rather than a Molex, maybe we can finally put together a build without including at least one Molex cable hooked up to the PSU.

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The well placed plastic shroud with the Corsair logo on it covers up the cooling for all of the hard drives. A black 140mm fan should be more than enough to keep our hard drives cool.

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Above the hard drive hot-swap you have the five 5¼ drive bays. To keep your devices safe and secure there are five tool-less latches, each with a Corsair logo. When you slide one of the latches to the right, everything tightens down and your devices are all secures.

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Up top you can see the three 120mm fan locations up are free from any obstacles or anything else that would blow airflow. It’s a little odd that those three fan locations are lacking any fans considering the 800D’s price.

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On the back you can see the 140mm fan they included and mounted just above the rear I/O panel.

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One of the most notable features of the 800D is its wire management. All the way around the motherboard you have a total of 12 holes for wire management. Of those twelve, eleven of them have grommets installed to give you a super clean look when everything is installed. Corsair left wire management for varies sized motherboards, something you rarely see anyone else include. That means that no matter what setup you go with in the 800D, it’s going to look amazing. As usual it’s always in the details, and I really like the small hole on the top left just for the 8 pin CPU connection. This is normally a wire that ends up stretched across your motherboard; Corsair took notice and included a nice way to hide it.

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Along with the wire management holes they also did something different for the access hole for the back of the CPU. Typically you would be lucky to find a large hole cut in the motherboard tray to access the back of the CPU for heatsink installation. Corsair however went above and beyond and even put a door on this hole on the 800D. I suspect this was done to help with controlling the air flow in the case also, but it’s just another example of their attention to detail that goes above and beyond what most manufactures do.

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Each of the PCI slot covers are held down by a thumbscrew. No fancy tool-less solutions here, just what works.

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Here is a full view of the back of the case with the side panel off. This is where all of your wiring will be hiding. Corsair gave more than enough room to pack all of your wiring between the side panel and the motherboard tray. It’s also a nice touch to see that all of the cabling for the case is black to match the case. Sometimes we see cases that have a bright red SATA cable or blue USB 3.0 cables that just look out of place against the black interior. All of the 800D’s cabling including the fan wires are black and would blend in if you couldn’t hide them (not that they don’t give enough ways to hide them, lol).

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Installation and Setup

As we spoke about the adaptability Corsair built into the 800D with all of its different wire management configurations in the Interior section of our review. Of course we couldn’t cover the 800D without testing it out completely. To do that we dropped one of our standard test rigs into the 800D. Here are the specs.

Intel i7 930 CPU Running at 2.8 (Stock)
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 Motherboard
Patriot Sector 7 Ram Triple Channel
Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive
CoGage True Spirit
Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU
Sapphire HD6970 Battlefield Vietnam Edition

Dropping in our motherboard went smoothly with nothing important to note. With our motherboard installed we went on to our CPU, heatsink, and RAM. Even though Corsair provided a great trap door on the motherboard tray to install a bracket on the back of your motherboard if needed, our CoGage heatsink didn’t require it. I did go ahead and double check with the motherboard installed to make sure that we would have more than enough clearance to access it if we decided to change it up in the future. We have had a few situations in the past where an access hole was provided but some motherboards would still have clearance issues.

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Even though I didn’t need to, I used one of the four hot swap bays on the front for our 2 TB hard drive. Installing the drive into the tray went smoothly and only required the four standard screws to keep it secure. While I was wiring the hard drive up I added all four SATA connections, if we need to add additional drives in the future it won’t even be necessary to open up the case at all.

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After dropping in our HD6970 the only thing left was to wire everything up. Surprisingly that was simpler than expected with the 800D’s built-in wire management. After packing the power supply into its section I routed all of the wires through the nearest grommet and towards the back. One at a time I routed each cable to its location and out the most convenient grommet. When it was all said and done you can hardly see any of the wiring through the window. Around back behind the motherboard tray there was more than enough room to pack all of the extra cables. The only issue I ran into was trying to reach our 8 pin connection up to the top left of the case. Between the case being large and trying to route behind the motherboard we had to dig out an extension cable to reach it properly.

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Performance

With Corsairs attention to detail in just about every aspect handling the 800D for just about any reason is always a pleasure. It gives you a chance to admire small details that you just don’t see on most other cases. The only downside to handing the 800D honestly is HANDLING it. With most of the case being a thick gauge steel, the 800D is an extremely heavy case. Even unloaded my back gets upset with me when I even consider picking it up. When loaded, you might as well forget it. This isn’t a case you would want to use if you pack up and go to LAN parties. Once you put it in its home, it’s going to stay there for a long time.

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Living with the 800D it’s easy to get spoiled with items like the built in hot swap. After putting everything together and wiring up all of the extra SATA connections. It was easy to drop another hard drive in, without even powering down my rig or taking the side panel off. Details like the push-button side panel removal are nice touches also. This is a case that makes you wonder why other case manufactures haven’t been doing the same things for years.

With only one video card used in testing it was hard to get a full grasp on the cooling power of the 800D and its three cooling zones. To help picture it all I put together two images that show how they break down. You can see were they exit and come in for everything other than the two intake areas on the bottom (one for the PSU Zone 3 and the second for Zone 1).

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All is well for the cooling in zones three and two. Other than the odd way of routing the air behind the motherboard tray I don’t think ether zone will have any cooling issues. When it came to Zone 1 I was starting to have my doubts. For one, you have two 140mm fans but only one is an intake. That fan pulls in indirectly through the PSU’s section through a vent on the bottom of the case. The power supply does a good job of taking care of its own cooling by pulling air in the bottom and out the back, but if the PSU heats up at all it will be heating up the incoming air into the all-important zone 1. So to bring in cool air for our CPU, motherboard, and video cards we are only pulling in air from one 140mm fan.

Normally adding cooling wouldn’t be a problem, we would just have to add a fan to bring in more air. Corsair even included the three spots at the top of the case, but there is a problem there. We have to use all three to push air in or pull air out, mixing up the two would just create more cooling issues. If we add three fans pushing air into the case we now have a 560mm’s worth of fans blowing air in, but only one 140mm fan pushing it out. This creates a 4 to 1 positive pressure in the case. In the end you can only cool the case as much as you can get the air out.

What does all of this mean to you? Well the 800D is a well-designed case with one flaw. The simple styling leaves it with less than adequate cooling for a large portion of the case. There is a great solution for this though: water cooling. Corsair and other manufactures have countless all in one solutions, or you can design your own. I wouldn’t recommend this case if you are planning on packing a high end multiple video setup into the 800D with air cooling. For our single video card setup with air cooling our temperatures were decent but we did see them creeping up during extended gaming sessions.



Overall and FV

Having spent a while with the 800D I can see how this was such a game changer for the case manufacturing industry. Corsair once again did what they do best, make a better mouse trap.  My experience with the 800D was positive from opening up the box, installing our rig into it, and putting it all to use with a little gaming. I did have a few concerns with the 800D’s weight, this is obviously not a case you would want to carry to and from LAN’s very often. Even more alarming was the cases performance in an all air cooling setup. Those of you looking to build that “ultimate” rig should consider picking up or piecing together a nice water cooling solution. Corsair did a great job making sure you would have more than enough room to install nearly any setup, including going all the way up to a 360mm push and pull radiator up top. I’m excited to see what they come up with in the future for a flagship case, it’s going to take a lot of work to upset the market like they did with the 800D. One thing is for sure, I hope next time it includes support for the new XL-ATX motherboards and more cooling.

fvrecomendededitorschoice

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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Wingless92's Avatar
Wingless92 replied the topic: #19768 12 Sep 2011 22:24
I freaking love this case. I have had mine for over a year now and I couldn't be happier.

I would agree on the cooling. With this case being out for awhile now people have started to see what you have to do to make it cool right. From what I have seen use the top 3 fans to push in, the back fan to push in and don't use the bottom fan. Also use the filter from the bottom on the top of the case so all of the air is still filtered.

If you are going to water cool your PC this is the case for you. If you like clean install's this is also the case for you.

Great review Wes!

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