Corsair Carbide 300R and Obsidian 550D Chassis Review

We’ve been impressed with what we’ve seen recently from Corsair, and we were glad that the company saw fit to send us a couple more mid-tower cases to pore over and test: the Corsair Carbide 300R compact gaming chassis and the Obsidian 550D quiet case. The two are dissimilar from one another in terms of design and purpose, but we’ve rolled them into a single review here for efficiency and your reading pleasure.

The 300R is a compact case; squeezing in everything a gamer would want was no doubt quite a design challenge (e.g. our big CPU cooler that barely fit). And although this chassis isn’t perfect, the gang over at Corsair deserves a tip of the hat for pulling it off as well as they did, given its intrinsic form factor restraints.

When you first behold the Corsair Obsidian 550D, you quickly see that, in contrast to the decidedly mesh-tastic 300R, the 550D is built with solid panes of steel (and brushed aluminum, on the front) with little room for daylight to peek through to the case’s interior. That’s because the 550D is designed primarily for sweet silence...