 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Obsidian 350D Micro ATX case. Exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high-performance PCs. Visit corsair.com slash obsidian to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Corsair 350D. Now Corsair initially launched their case line with an Obsidian case that was an ATX case, a very large one I might add, the 800D. And then they followed it up, they fleshed out the lineup with additional cases in lower end series such as Carbide or Graphite. And Obsidian has been reserved for their extremely high-end cases. Now this is their first Micro ATX case and it is not losing the performance heritage of any of their sort of launch cases which I guess the only one that I can really compare it to is actually the 800D. But let's not worry too much about that. The point is this is meant to change the way that people build small high-performance systems. I mean with boards like Asus's Gene series which have been available for a couple generations now. There's really no reason why you can't put exactly as much cooling and exactly as much performance on a Micro ATX system as you can on an ATX system. So once I actually figure out how to get the box open here, so you can see my thumb is jammed in there trying to get the... Ah, there we go. So we'll be back in just a moment. Now the case itself comes in a hard foam but more on that in a moment. Let's see what Coursera has to say for themselves on the box. They've got a QR code here, photos, videos, product tour and more. But don't worry about that, you're watching a video about the product right now. Blown up version of the case. They've also got some general details about the overall specs, flexible cooling options. Comes with one 40mm intake fan, one 20mm exhaust fan. There are five mounts total. The front and top mounts are spaced for 240mm radiators for more cooling options. That's what Coursera has done well, is they've really integrated liquid cooling options well with their cases. Not only accommodating for their own products, which are usually sort of pre-filled all-in-one units, but also for custom liquid cooling. I mean this is something that a lot of manufacturers do that drives me absolutely crazy, is they operate under this assumption that the consumer is going to buy only their own products. And it's like, you know, okay, but what about consumers who aren't interested in all-in-one liquid coolers? You know, so you look at a lot of different cases and they are completely unoptimized for a custom cooling loop. And they call themselves water cooling ready because they put radiator ready spacing in the top so that you could mount an all-in-one. So anyway, that's just my little rant. Now Coursera doesn't do this, particularly looking at their most recent cases like the 350D as well as the 900D. So not the greatest phone that I've ever seen, not particularly dense, not particularly strong. It is a smaller case and this is a factor. You don't need to protect it as much in shipping when it's smaller and doesn't weigh as much. So I'm sure Coursera did the necessary drop tests, like there are standards for this crush testing and all that kind of stuff, before bringing the 350D to market because they've been generally pretty good about packaging overall, having worked at an online retailer in Canada where shipping can often result in things dying, very horrible deaths. It didn't happen too much with Coursera stuff. So let's start with the outside of the case. We've got a nice big window on the side. I like this. I don't necessarily always prefer a window that lets you see everything like the power supply and drives and all that kind of stuff. But what I like about this particular one is it gives it a very clean look because the size of the window isn't overly huge, but it's sort of even on all sides and just makes it look very, very clean without sort of being over the top flashy, gamer-y looking. On the front, you can see this front plate did seem to... Ooh, that came loose, didn't it? That's a shame. Okay, so let's go ahead and speaking of shipping in Canada being a bit of a nightmare, let's have a look at the front plate here. So it's a beautiful brushed aluminum finish on the metal front plate. Hopefully you guys can see that very small, innocuous Coursera logo on the bottom. They've got two little dots here so that you'll know where to press if you want to remove this. And it looks like... Oh, it looks like that comes off. That's lucky. There we go. All right, so no actual damage done to the case, which is wonderful. We've got a removable fan filter here in the front. So in the front, you can either mount a single 140 millimeter fan or you can do dual 120 millimeter fans. You can actually see there are alternate mounting points here, here, here, and here. Okay, I get it now. So I'm going to put this on. Ooh, I hate touching these because it's going to stain. Ah, ah. So I'm going to put this back on. So you can see the ventilation comes in around the sides here, sides and bottom. So there's lots of space there. And then one Coursera is done. I'm just going to do that. Is they've put in a dead space here. Okay, okay, there we go. They've put in a dead space here that's blocked off by these to allow the fans to not be just trying to draw air directly from a plastic plate that's right in front of them. So instead, they're bringing air in around from the sides where there's that dead space and then they can pull in from there. So, okay, we'll go ahead and remove the front fan filter. Check this out. So it can accommodate a single 140 millimeter fan in the middle, which is what Coursera ships it with. In the area where there's the least restriction. So if you look through that fan, it goes right directly into the chassis. However, you have the option with the included mounting holes here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Anyway, all over the place to mount dual 120s or even dual 140 millimeter fans in the front of the case. The other fans won't necessarily have quite the same effectiveness of this one fan, but obviously doubling up the fans, even if efficiency is reduced a little bit, is still going to give you more overall cooling performance. So that's a very cool approach to take there. On the top of the case. Oh, right. So two five and a quarter inch bays, headphone, microphone and reset switches here, power switch up here, two USB 3.0 super speeds and then, yeah, two five and a quarter inch base. So there that takes care of the front. On the top, you've got that same flexibility. So dual 120 mil or dual 140 millimeter and check this out. In order to account for the fact that sometimes the spacing isn't exact on certain liquid coolers or whatever else, they've expanded the holes for one of the 140 millimeter mounts. So you can change the spacing a little bit if you want. That's that's actually a really nice touch as well. It goes to show you Corsair actually builds a system in their systems in their cases before they release them to market, which I can't say for everyone on this side. There's not a whole lot. Okay, blank side panel here. We've got a removable fan filter. That's actually one of the most ruggedly designed removable fan filters I've ever seen. Look at this thing. It's like solid. Usually they're extremely flimsy. So let's go ahead and and the rails that it sits in are really nice as well locks into place. So you can see there's a little bit of resistance to remove that. And then it has like these huge plastic rails that sits on. That's kind of nice. The feet are covered in little rubber feet so that it doesn't slide around all over the place. And that's cool. So check this out all the pieces in the bottom. Okay, so there's rivets here here here here and here but it looks like the drive cages are going to be mounted by screws. So we should be able to remove those. No problem at the back of the case. We find pretty standard. Oh look at this five PCI expansion slots. So they've allowed you to install a dual slot card in the bottom of your m80x board. So that will effectively give you what you would normally have on a board with five expansion slots. So you can fill this one fill this one and then you can actually install an additional card in between. Even if you have something like an SLI setup, which is very cool. I've always felt that's a limitation of the micro ATX platform is that you can't have two dual slot graphics cards running an SLI or crossfire. And have a high-end audio card or something like that. So that's really cool to see as well. 120 millimeter cooling fan in the back liquid cooling holes, which course are wisely left in because most people won't be using those as well. Standard power supply mounting. All right, let's open this bad boy up and find out what makes her tick. Fun screws on the back make it easy to remove the back panel. Overall, I'd say it's not quite at the same level as I would have expected from an obsidian class case looking at cases like the 800D and the 650D in terms of the construction. So there's a little bit of flex here. As you guys can see, I mean, we expect this on a windowed side panel. But quite honestly, when I wrapped on the other side panel, it wasn't really all that awe inspiring either. Oh, actually, OK, that's not as bad as I thought. OK, well, there you go. Either way, I mean, it's not built like an 800D, but it's also not priced like an 800D. So there's sort of something to consider. All right. So once we get inside, we've got two, three and a half inch sliding hard drive cages. Now, these are usually flimsy, but once you actually put a drive in them, they stiffen right up and so you can slide those back in there. This whole cage comes out. Love the use of screws for the construction instead of using rivets. So there's those screws on the bottom as well as right here. Screws on the back. This gives you the flexibility. See one, two, looks like just two screws on this side here. This gives you the flexibility to remove the whole thing, including these two and a half inch mounts. That's how you're going to be able to mount those radiators in the front of the case itself, which leaves you just with five and a quarter inch bays up here in the bottom. They've of course got support for nice long power supplies. I mean, Corsair builds an awful lot of power supplies, so they're going to want you to be able to use anything from their range and something that they're going to brand as a performance class case. And they've done another wise thing here, which is to include enough cable routing holes in the bottom. This is huge. So many case guys have like one hole at the bottom and then like six holes around the motherboard tray. It's like, OK, well, how where are all these cables going to come from if I wasn't able to put them through here? So there's two big ones down here. There's one up here for your eight pin or your four pin one up here for whatever you might need to run to the very top right hand edge of your board. Maybe they want you to use it for routing the front I.O. or something like that behind the motherboard tray. And then once here for your 24 pin or whatever else, assuming you're not just routing them around the edge of the motherboard tray here. Motherboard tray itself feels quite solid considering that there's an extremely large cut out for the CPU. So no matter where your CPU socket is positioned, you shouldn't have too much difficulty with that. And I just want to have a look at. Oh, check that out. So that's how this comes out. There you go. There's your two and a half inch drive mount. So these are awesome. Hey, Sleight, can you throw me an SSD? Preferably Corsair. See, now I'm putting that now I'm putting the pressure on him. There we go. Haha. Corsair Neutron GTX. So this is how the installation process works here. You just pop this bad boy in and it loads just like that. Look at that spring loaded too. So when you open it up, it pops it out for you. You don't have to do any of the work. This is actually better than the one that I saw implemented on. I believe it was the 300R. That one was a little bit stiff and a little bit hard to get the drives out of. Looks like Corsair figured that out and got that fixed with this guy right here. So there you go. Now there's tons of space there. So what's the point of all this? I guess would be the next question. Oh, yeah, there's some internal cables and stuff that you might want to see. Corsair, of course, always with the nice little touches. I mean, it's all about spending money in the right places. Spend money making that OEM use black cables. They don't like it because, you know, it's harder to QC, but make them do it. And then maybe the side panels a little bit thinner or whatever else. Don't worry too much about that because this is the way that people end up with systems that actually look good and look high performance and look high class. That's why Corsair cases have so many build logs done in them where it just looks really good because they spend the time and spend the money on those little finishing touches. Same thing, even a USB. I'd like to see someone implement a less bulky USB 3 connector, but I guess, you know, you can't have everything that you want necessarily. But either way, it's all black. Even the connector here at the end. I've seen a lot of them that are black, except this little bit's blue. You can still see it. You can still see it coming out. Included little bits here. So you got fan screws. That's good. You got some other more different screws. You got some zip ties and all that kind of stuff. I like this personally when they include one stationary standoff that doesn't get something screwed into it because it gives you a reference point for where to position the board as you're putting it into the case. Not everyone does this and even many brands that do it don't do it consistently. So there you go. Corsair, if you're watching this, keep doing this. I like this. I appreciate this. There's a tool-less 5-1⁄4-inch bay, but as usual, you don't have to use it tool-lessly. You can screw screws in and that will actually be more secure for things like shipping it around. And I think we're pretty much done here. So why do we need this? If you want to build a high-performance system, you know, SLI Crossfire or whatever else, and you don't want to expend any more space than you absolutely need to, if you want something that could be portable, say for example, if you're a video production house and you want to be able to move around a rendering workstation with you, that's not that heavy, then something like this would be a fantastic choice. And the fact that it's windowed and liquid cooling ready and all that good stuff is just kind of icing on the cake at this point. Thanks for checking out this unboxing and first look on Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.