 So I want to get started unboxing the Carbide 500R from Corsair right away. This is what I would consider to be a bigger brother to the 400R, which is also in the Carbide family of products. Remember, Corsair's highest end is their Obsidian line, followed by the Graphite line, and then by the Carbon or Carbide line at the lowest end in their current lineup of gaming cases. Which isn't to say that even a lowest end Corsair case is not a good choice, because it would be. Corsair's philosophy for the design of their gaming cases is all about functionality while maintaining a certain aesthetic appeal. So when we saw the 800D come out with a ton of features that just hadn't been done before, the expectation was that the rest of, of course, our case lineup would include a ton of features that haven't been done before at the price points that they're going to be arriving at. And you technically can't end a sentence with the word at, but I did it. So here we are. So there are some key differences already between, sorry guys, the 500R and the 400R, but let's start with the overall look of the outside of the case, and we'll go from there. So the front of the case. Yeah, let's do that. We have dual 120mm fan mounts here and here. We've got a nice mesh finish, and then we've got four 5.25 inch bays, a power button, two USB 3.0 ports, a hard drive LED, microphone and headphone ports, firewire, looks like you're able to turn the LEDs on and off, and a fan speed controller. The fan speed controller is not included on the 400R. Finally, a reset switch. The sides of this case are very clean looking. So we've got this bulge, which exists for a reason. That's to give you clearance for the side fans to blow down on the CPU area as well as the video card area. In this case, you can do dual 120s, dual 140s, and they all have rubber grommets for noise dampening, or you can do a single 200mm, and in this case, it's a white LED fan that is included. Okay, on the other side, we find lots of room for cable routing in the form of a bulge that comes out of the side, but it's sort of a sleek looking bulge. It's very aerodynamic. So if the case was like going really fast, like, eeeh, it wouldn't actually cause that much of a disturbance in the airflow pattern. Okay, you know, it's hard for me to get away with sort of stuff like that, but it doesn't actually, it actually looks pretty good. Things that are aerodynamic, I personally find tend to look better than things that are not aerodynamic. And I think when you look at car design, you find that to be somewhat, somewhat true. You know, more sleek, curvy, angular type cars tend to look better than like a box on wheels, right? Alright, so at the back, we find, as I mentioned before, lots of cable routing space, although it doesn't look like it, based on that if there was a flush side panel, it would sit like eeeh, this far above the motherboard tray, but because of the way they've designed the side panel, there will be plenty of room to run your EPS 4-pin, any fan cables you want to run, anything like that. So say you wanted to, you know, put this under your motherboard and run it down the back, then you would be able to do that without any difficulty. These are plugged into the fan controller at this point in time, so those are the front white LED 120mm fans that are also included, and then I think that pretty much covers it for the back here, there's not a whole lot that I want to say about that. On the other side, we open up the case and we find, here we are, hey check this out, you can't lose your thumb screws, they don't come out. I have seen that feature before, but I haven't seen it in a while, so there you go. There's your fan, and there's your panel, putting that away. Alright, so inside here, the first thing I want to try to figure out, because right now I'm not really sure what's going on here, aha, here, sorry, come up to the front. I, oh, nope, aha, there we are. I was trying to figure out this whole time how that comes out, now I know. So it clicks in here, and you just kind of push it in from the back, and click it like that, and it comes out. So there's your mesh, okay, which is going to cover up an area where you can mount your top mounted 120mm water cooling unit. So Corsair's done very smart work here with the spacing of their 120 or 140mm mounting holes, and they've put them as close together as possible so that regardless of which kind of a radiator you have, you will be able to install it without any difficulty. Here's where you can mount your fan wires, and over here is where you will mount the tubes that come out of the top of your rad down to your CPU socket. So I'm going to go ahead and put this back on so that the case doesn't just look, you know, totally skeleton by the end of the video here, and let's have a look at the inside layout. It's very similar to the 400R except for, I'd say, at least one key thing, and that is this. So check this out. You can actually completely remove the top set of three hard drive cages, well hard drive or SSD cages, whichever you prefer. Oh, hold on. I believe there are also screws on the back that are preventing me from removing it at this time. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and remove those. So it's difficult to remove, I'd say, but this isn't the kind of thing that you would have to remove just for installing a hard drive. You can still install a hard drive just by using the sliding plastic rails, and that is compatible with both 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives, but when you're building your machine initially and you go to install a Radeon 699 that you happen to have lying around and you discover that, okay, it fits anyway, so that's clearly not what they were thinking here. Remember, this is the longest graphics card in existence at this time, at least on the consumer side of things. So if there are longer graphics cards in the future, you can go ahead and pull this out. I mean, imagine what a graphics card that long would look like, but I mean, I'm not here to judge, right? So yeah, you would be able to remove that. And I believe the other one also comes out as well just by undoing the screws at the back. So like I said, this is how you actually install a drive. That is only if you discover during your build that maybe you want to have less restriction on the fan that's blowing over your graphics card, maybe you have a longer graphics card. I don't know what your reasoning is. I don't really care. It doesn't matter because it's your reasoning, not mine. You can remove the cage. All right, let's go and look at what's in here. Here's their little hard drive sort of Mimicar cardboard piece. Here we have something that won't be relevant until a minute from now when I explain why it's here. So here's power for the fan controller and whatnot. Here's another, oh, another header for the fan controller. So you can plug in the side panel fan. All right, the back fan doesn't run off that. And I will tell you why. Because the expectation from Corsair is that if you're building an ultimate machine and you know who Corsair is and you bought this case, you're probably going to go with an H80 or an H100 to cool your CPU. So if that's the case, that's going to go ahead and take care of the control of that back fan for you. You don't need your case to do it. So there you go. All right, we've got our front USB 3 and we also have included an adapter. Which we can put on like this. If you want to use front USB 2 instead of front USB 3 because your case doesn't support front USB 3 or your motherboard doesn't support it. Your case does. You have front 1394 firewire, front HD audio and front switches and LEDs and whatnot. All kinds of good stuff. You've got lots of grommets. So these are two filtered either 120, 140 millimeter fan mounts or power supply rubber grommets to support it and then ventilation holes to make sure that your 120 mil fan on your power supply is getting lots of air because there are rubber feet on the bottom of the case which is going to keep it raised off the table or carpet or wherever you happen to put it and make sure your power supply doesn't starve. All right, I already mentioned the rubber grommets. Here's the CPU cutout as well as the motherboard back plate or motherboard tray being very reinforced. It does reinforce it to put these patterns in it. So it's a very rigid motherboard back plate. That's good especially if you are shipping the system. I haven't forgotten the accessories but I am getting a prompt about I think that's it. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight PCI slots which is great because if you have a bottom PCI Express slot at the very bottom of your board you can still install a dual slot graphics card should you desire to do so. Last but not least, the rest of the accessories which includes some zip ties, some plastic clips for mounting cables or for routing cables. We've got some screws, some more different screws, some motherboard standoffs, some other more different screws and finally the more different screws that we have seen yet. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Corsair 500R. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.