Corsair Carbide Air 240 Case Review
by E. Fylladitakis on August 15, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- ATX
- Case
- Carbide
Corsair Carbide Air 240 Interior
Regardless of the external color of the case, the interior of the Carbide Air 240 is all black, with the sole exception being the grey stock cooling fan blades. The chassis is made from relatively thin SECC steel, but it offers adequate mechanical strength for the small size of the case, which is further supported by the motherboard tray. As we mentioned before, the Carbide Air 240 is split in two sections; the left section houses the main system, while the PSU and drives go to the right section.
There are several holes on the motherboard tray, covered with rubber grommets, for the cables to be routed between the two sections. The design dictates that, for the best possible visual result, the cables should be routed away from the system and into the opaque right compartment. For additional cable management, Corsair punched a few cable tie mounting points in the right compartment of the case. There is a large opening behind the CPU area as well, for the installation of CPU coolers, but it is blocked by the 3.5" drive cage. The cage has to be removed in order to access the rear of the CPU socket.
Motherboards of up to Micro-ATX size can be installed in the Carbide Air 240, but there is a catch: if you do install a Micro-ATX motherboard, you cannot install a liquid cooling radiator at the bottom of the case. You also cannot really install one at the top panel either, since the fan alone is just a hair away from the top of the motherboard. Therefore, you basically need to choose between two GPUs and a Micro-ATX motherboard, or two large liquid cooling radiators and a Mini-ITX motherboard (presumably with one GPU).
There are limitations for those of you who will be using air coolers as well. The clearance for an air cooler is about 124mm, which is ample for many air coolers but not enough for top-tier products. Super-tall air coolers, such as the Noctua NH-D15, will not fit inside the Carbide Air 240. Corsair also indicates that the maximum PSU length is 200mm, but technically there is nothing blocking the PSU compartment and even longer units can be installed. Of course, considering that >200mm units also tend to have a >1.4kW output, that would be the very definition of overkill inside a case such as this.
As far as stock cooling is concerned, the case ships with three Corsair A1225L12S-2 120mm fans installed from the factory. Two can be found behind the front mesh and one at the top of the case, above the CPU area. These sleeve bearing fans have been designed with silence in mind, with a maximum speed of 1300RPM.
Black cables and parts are easily hidden inside an all-black chassis; for visual clarity, we are using an AX760i PSU with a red cable pack and white SATA cables for our pictures. Building a system inside the Corsair Carbide Air 240 is a very simple and straightforward procedure. The spacious format and the tool-less expansion card locking mechanism allow for the very quick assembly of a full system. For those that care about a great visual effect as well, we believe that most of the assembly time will be spent optimizing the routing of the cables.
With a full Micro-ATX system installed in the Carbide Air 240, we found that we had a lot of space available for cable management in the right side of the case, with much of it needlessly taken by the long wires of the Corsair AX760i PSU depicted in the gallery above. We believe that it will not be long before short cable sets become available for specific fully modular PSUs that fit high performance compact systems, such as this one. You will most likely still have to use a long CPU power cable though, as the cable has to be routed above the motherboard and there is no opening at the top left side of the motherboard tray. Also, it is worthwhile to note that a Micro-ATX motherboard will block the first row of grommets, which are obviously meant for Mini-ITX motherboards instead.
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know of fence - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link
Do you think that at some point in the future you could arrive at the conclusion, that coolers which consume several times the power, with their failure prone mechanical pumps and fans which also require manual speed adjustment maybe aren't worth the trouble?kyuu - Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - link
Nope, because those "failure prone" pumps and fans are a much more efficient means of cooling. We're talking about desktop systems here, so it consuming a couple extra watts of power isn't really meaningful.I don't particularly care if you prefer air cooling. There are air coolers that work very well; I currently have a Zalman air cooler on my CPU, which replaced the Zalman air cooler on my previous CPU. But CLCs have very real advantages (while not being perfect, as no technology is), so I do take issue with people railing against is though choosing CLCs is somehow wrong.
I have no idea what you're talking about with the requiring manual adjustment thing.
kyuu - Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - link
railing against it as though***Damn lack of an edit button...
StrangerGuy - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
IMO this case is terribly designed. If Corsair are going to make a cube case, why not just copy the 250D design, make it fit a mATX mobo and 2x120mm radiator on the left side then be done with. Made even worse without a single 5.25 bay despite all the space at the right side.kyuu - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
"Motherboards of up to Micro-ATX size can be installed in the Carbide Air 240, but there is a catch: if you do install a Micro-ATX motherboard, you cannot install a liquid cooling radiator at the bottom of the case. You also cannot really install one at the top panel either, since the fan alone is just a hair away from the top of the motherboard. Therefore, you basically need to choose between two GPUs and a Micro-ATX motherboard, or two large liquid cooling radiators and a Mini-ITX motherboard (presumably with one GPU)."I checked out Corsair's specs, and it says that radiators are intended to be used on the bottom mounts and the *front*. The mounts at the top of the case are not intended for radiators at all, whether you're using mATX or mini-ITX. So you can, in fact, mount a single 240mm rad with an mATX (or, presumably, two 120mm rads) on the front of the case. Which makes me interested in this case.
kyuu - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
Though the one thing that would give me pause is if there's room for a thick (~50mm) push/pull radiator on the bottom. Looks like one might not fit due to the GPU, though a thinner one or one with a single fan might.Etern205 - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Never like this Corsair case, they want to make it like a cube. A cube is suppose to be compact and yet this is way too large. One problem I still don't get is the back and forth bickering about 5.25" drive bays. I still have a optical drive that I use occasionally, because it's the fastest method for me to install games as I prefer physical media as my bandwidth is consider slow compare to all the others, and other have bandwidth caps, so downloading a 15GB game is out of the question. Also 5.25" drives aren't just only for optical drives. It's not like the computer won't boot up or literally spit out the optical drive. You can use it for many other things like, LCD fan controllers, HDD bays, and many other stuffs. It's useful if you know what to do with it.kenoh - Sunday, August 31, 2014 - link
You can install 3-3.5" HDD's, but how many SSD's can you install?kenoh - Sunday, August 31, 2014 - link
Is it possible for this case to hold 4 SSD's, with all three HDD's installed? BTW, what PSU is used in this review?mekpro - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link
That's Abit Motherboard !