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.
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).
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.
