 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. Let me open this video by saying I've got an email thread that's about a mile long with George from Corsair about this case, and I do have a number of complaints about it, but his response of, well, what else can you get at this price that's this easy to build in and has these features is pretty fair. The 450D, if you don't feel like skipping to the end to hear the conclusion, delivers great features at a great price with great airflow and in my opinion, very good looks, which isn't to say that I'm going to completely let him off the hook. The packing material is not the best hard foam I've ever seen, but it's not really a concern unless you're having someone else build your system for you and then ship it to you. All right, so once it's out of the box, this is a bit of an unusual look for an Obsidian. Instead of going for a very plain look with simple straight lines, Corsair has, in my mind, done a great job of delivering solid cooling performance and still having it look pretty clean. Out of the box with the included AF140L fans, it still maintains a professional front bezel look, but because the front design with its removable fan filter is so open, throwing some LED fans in there would be a super easy way to give your system some gamer bling. I think it's a great balance. Speaking of great balance, the top fan filter is pretty much brilliant. Their flexible mesh and magnet solution to dust filtration is inexpensive, aesthetically pleasing and convenient. The bottom fan filter ain't half bad either. It's much easier to remove and replace without being able to see it because it uses a rigid plastic frame and a few magnets around the edges to make it very easy to position. Now I guess I glossed over the front I.O. when I was talking about the front. There's nothing too special here. Two USB 3 ports, a headphone and a microphone jack, a recessed reset switch and a large power switch. The power and drive activity LEDs are built into the power button. The side window is great too, a nice large side panel. Window looks great on these smaller cases as long as cable management inside is good and the 450D is almost as good as other Obsidian cases in terms of cable routing options. Finally at the back we find seven PCI slots, some water cooling tubing holes that Corsair has given up even pretending that people use. Note that they don't even bother including rubber grommets for them anymore and an included 120 millimeter series or AF series fan. I griped at George about not putting in eight PCI slots when it really looks like there was room for an additional one and his response here was also pretty fair and that's that no one should be putting four graphics cards in quad SLI in a mid tower. There's just not enough room to cool them adequately unless you do a side intake like on the Vengeance C70. Alright George, fair point. Opening up the case is done with four thumb screws at the back. There are no real complaints here but I'd love to see Corsair implement the self retaining side panel screws that NZXT has put on the H440. It doesn't cost much and is a great hassle saver for the user. Now that the case is open the layout will look pretty familiar to anyone who has seen its little MATX brother the 350D. By comparison the 450D accepts a full size ATX motherboard and Corsair has basically just added a three and a half inch slash two and a half inch drive bay sled to utilize the extra height and moved the super handy spring loaded SSD mounts to the back of the motherboard tray. A great move since it frees up space in the front for either a 240 or 280 millimeter radiator. Speaking of radiators the case can handle rads in up to four spots without any modification. An exceptional feat for a case this size. By my super precise eyeball measurements it looks like you could do a 280 or 360 in the top, a 120 in the back, two 240s in the front and at the bottom all at the same time. Unreal. Speaking of radiator support for a case that is so well liquid cooling optimized I feel like the top panel was a bit of a missed opportunity. The way that Corsair allows the grommets to be easily repositioned so you can mount a dual 120 millimeter radiator in a variety of places is great for improving compatibility but I would have liked to see the holes offset to the side away from the motherboard to improve compatibility with thicker radiators and the top eight pin and four pin connectors on motherboards. The recently released H105 actually doesn't fit in this case with this motherboard and this incompatibility was entirely avoidable. I understand that the centered holes do look a lot better but the magnetic mesh would have hidden offset holes. So guys let me know in the comments if you prefer the look of the 450D with the mesh or if you prefer the look of the 450D without the mesh so that'll give me a good idea of whether the offset holes would have been okay because if you're going to run it without the mesh you're not going to want those offset holes. It looks really weird. Cable management is a good point for this case. There is ample room in the back for the 24 pin and other bulky connectors and the included cables for the front panel actually come pre-managed with nice little zip ties tied in place so you pretty much don't have to move them. But note that I said cable management is a good point for this case and not a great one. This is one of two things that made the case feel a little more like a carbide or a graphite than an obsidian to me. The back of the motherboard tray has only four cable management loops on it and when they're basically free to add I'd like to see a lot more. In addition to that there's no way to cleanly route the front panel audio without crossing over at least a few inches of motherboard down here at the bottom. Most cases have a little spot in the bottom left for that connector and this feels like a bit of an oversight. The last thing that's missing is any room in the top aside from the hole for the 8 pin connector to route smaller stuff like CPU fan cables. Usually we see a couple gaps up here to facilitate this but instead we're stuck going between the motherboard and motherboard tray or just routing them across the board. The second thing that felt unobsidian-y was the 3.5 inch drive cage. It's tool-less which is great and while I appreciate the flexibility of being able to hang the cage from the top of the 5.25 inch bays or sit it at the bottom it just feels a little bit flimsier than the rest of the case in contrast sharply with the motherboard tray which is very rigid in spite of the large CPU cutout. A second cage would also have been a nice touch since they're using a modular design that allows you to simply slide in another one to double your hard drive expansion but if you're targeting a price point then I guess it makes more sense to sell that as an upgrade option rather than charge everyone for a feature that only a handful of people are actually going to use. It should be noted that leaving it out also helps this case achieve fantastic airflow over the GPU area without the use of ugly side panel fans so I see why they did it this way. One thing that stood out to me was that Corsair includes hilariously few screws in the box. Basically some fan screws, motherboard screws and 2.5 inch drive screws. Pretty much everything else is tool-less and while this is another thing that's probably only a concern for system integrators shipping systems around in the 450D I would have liked to see Corsair include some hard drive screws so I had the option to secure things a little bit better if I want to. With those few complaints out of the way the conclusion for the 450D is actually pretty positive if you consider its cooling, flexibility, looks and price you're going to have a hard time finding a better looking bang for your buck. And speaking of paying for sex my wife actually built the test rig you're looking at with me looking over her shoulder so for all my complaints about little cable management details an inexperienced builder can still end up with a damn fine looking system. 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