Corsair Carbide 300R and Obsidian 550D 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.

Now that we’ve had a chance to explore and test the Corsair Carbide 300R, we’ve become well acquainted with the whole Carbide family, and the little bro is just as impressive as the bigger siblings we reviewed not too long ago, the Carbide 400R and 500R.

The 300R is a compact case at just 17.7 x 19.1 x 8.3 inches (HxWxD); 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.
The all-black 300R is built out of steel, with pieces here and there made from black plastic. There are three 5.25-inch trays with toolless locking mechanisms, and the four 3.5-inch drive trays are flexible plastic that require nothing more than a little bending to pop a drive into place. The latter are equipped with well-placed screw holes to allow for mounting a 2.5-inch drive in any of them with no need for adapters.

This mid-tower case has seven expansions slots, although if you’re using an ATX case, it’s possible that you’ll only be able to use the lower six; the highest slot was occluded by our motherboard's components, which we'd wager may be an issue with other boards, as well.


Accessories included with the 300R are the bare essentials and include the quick start guide, a few bags of screws, and some zip ties. That's just basic run-down, though; let’s dig in and see what the 300R is really all about.