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Corsair Carbide AIR 540 Computer Case Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by leeghoofd @ 2013-07-11

During COMPUTEX 2013 CORSAIR introduced a few new enclosures, the Carbide 330R and the 540 AIR version. While the first is more a refinement of exiting designs, the new 540 AIR sports a revolutionary design for mass production cases. The concept behind this case is that the case is divided in two halves. One side houses the mainboard, graphics card and cooling devices. The second compartment leaves room for HDD/SSDs, optical drives and the power supply. Thus the airflow is maximized for the hotter running components of your favourite hardware. The big custom made cube cases, in particular the UFO series from Mountain Mods are the foundation for these particular multi-compartment designs. However CORSAIR seems to have pulled it off to bring this design to the masses at a fraction of the cost.

Test Setup and Specifications

The Carbide range is targetted at the "I want a no fuzz case at an affordable price level " crowd. Compared to previous reviews Madshrimps opted to install a single AMD 7970 graphics card in stead of the regular two GTX480s we usually use when reviewing gaming enclosures. For the cooling tests the case is equipped with the brand new Corsair H110 Hydro cooler.

The hardware comprises of the following parts:

ASUS Sabretooth X79 mainboard
Intel i7-3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz 1.37Vcore
Corsair Hydro110 cooling
16Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ 2133C9 RAMs
1 x AMD 7970HD graphic card
2 x Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green Hard Drives
1 x Intel 520 240GB SSD
Corsair HX1050 Power Supply.

For the IDLE tests we let the setup warm up during a 30 min period. The temperatures of the CPU cores are monitored by the Realtemp software. The temperatures of the motherboard components are read out by the ASUS Thermal Radar software. For the stress test we go flat out and test our the six cores of the overclocked i7-3960X CPU (4500MHz) with the Prime95 64bit software with a custom 12-12K setting. For the GPU test we run a 3 time loop of the Futuremark Vantage 3D bench software to heat up the graphics core.

Here are some screenshots of the ASUS Thermal RADAR software in action:

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