 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the only true successor to the original Enthusiast Class case from Corsair. This is the 900D and it picks up where the 800D left off. The 800D was at the time revolutionary. It made cable management turn into something that everyone could do with its grommeted cable management holes that by now pretty much everybody has copied. It was huge and it wasn't afraid to be huge. Before the 800D, the only cases you could get that were large were not even really like... a lot of the time they weren't even proper like normal cases. Like they had 5.25 inch bays that were like weirdly mounted on the side and stuff like that. And it was not afraid to let you water cool. The 800D takes everything about the 800D and just completely amps it up. It's like injecting steroids directly into its carotid. So there you go. For foam, we've got a fairly... not quite super brittle foam, but it's also not a closed cell soft foam. But Corsair compensates by making it extremely thick. And as you guys know, it is the girth, not the length that is the most important thing. You've got another inch and a quarter or so right here on the top. So let's go ahead and tilt this over so you guys can have a look at what the 900D looks like inside the case. So while the box is huge, the 900D is also huge. I'm probably going to need Slick's help taking this out of the box. So we're going to tip it over and we'll be back in just a moment. How big is the 900D you might ask? To which I would reply, you could easily fit at least six cats inside. Before they even started to cause problems. So it comes with bubble wrap around it to prevent any kind of, or at least my review sample does, I don't know if they all do. But this will prevent any random incidental sort of punctures and jabs with this cardboard and this bubble wrap layer here. So I'm going to go ahead and pull this off. We've got another cardboard layer here which hopefully I can remove. I thought I was done with my knife, but they've packed it extremely well to ensure that it gets here safely. And this is going to be especially important packaging wise. Corsair could not afford to skimp on this case because especially once you actually build a system inside it, it is going to be heavy and big. So unless it's built extremely solidly and packed extremely well, you are going to end up with a damaged computer at the other end of any kind of shipping expedition. So we're having some trouble here. So we're going to get this wrapping done here. We've got the box out of the way and the unveiling is pretty much complete. Ain't she a thing of beauty. Gorgeous, enormous window that shows you everything. At the angle you'll actually normally be looking at it from. So we're going to go ahead and adjust that right there. So it shows you everything from your back radiator presumably, your motherboard. You're going to see the power supply a little bit, but not too much. And then you're going to see a little bit of your drive cages here, but again, not too much of that. We're actually going to take a little bit of time to take all of the plastic covers off. So there's plastic covers holding things like the I.O. cover in place, holding things like the front panel in place as well as protecting things like the side panel window here and little bits of trim like this. So we'll be back in a moment again with all that removed. So I wanted to show you guys a few things that I noticed when I was taking the plastic off. Number one is holy crap, the system for side panels on this case is cool. So I've taken the black plastic off the window. You can see it's very, very clear, very transparent. However, you still get that thing with all acrylic windows where it does. It's very staticky, so it tends to collect. See there's cat hair on it already, but that's just kind of life. The side panel, because it's basically all acrylic, does have a bit of flex to it. But I'm not super concerned because it's still got some weight, which is going to help it resist any vibration. I love the mounting system for the glass. Just look at this. It's like solid screws and just feels really good. I mean, even my TJ07, which is the case that I'm using right now, just had like cheesy little plastic fixings on it. Not very, not very great. Now you don't have to remove the top panel in order to remove the bottom panel here. So you just pop this open and it's on a friction hinge here. So right there and then over on the other side, there's another one just like that that controls this opening up. And I wanted to show you guys how Corsair has included all the appropriate little bits of adhesive so that things don't fall off in shipping. So they've protected all the corners and then they've protected things like the magnetic fan filters from coming off. Magnetic fan filters really are the best way to go about this because every other system I've seen, I mean the original sort of fan filters in cases were usually screwed on and then some of the later ones came along and they were like latched on or they were slid in or whatever else. But check this out. I mean, this is how hard it is to remove your fan filter. You take that, you throw it under the sink, you clean it out, you put it back. Just like that. And the fact that the intake for the case here and the exhaust for the case over there is so easy to get at is extremely convenient. Now speaking of intake and exhaust, you can see all around the edges here, there's a gap here as well as over here and all along the bottom. That is how that fan is actually getting any air. And Corsair thought about this. They didn't just sort of willy-nilly apply ventilation holes here. There's a gap between that piece on the front and these pieces right here where you apply your fan filter that's going to allow for there to be, it acts as a bit of a, oh crap, the word escapes me, shroud. Thank you. Shroud that will allow it to actually draw some air in. So that's very, very smart. Now I want to take you around to the other side really quick. So there we go. And there we go. That's latched on. Where I want to show you, it's okay, I got it. It's not actually that much heavier than an 800D, which is nice. It does use aluminum support struts in order to keep from just being ludicrously heavy. So there you go. If I can move it, you can probably move it. The one button releases at the back for the top panels here. First I'll show you that functionality where the bottom opens up without the top actually being open. You can get at your drives, you can actually upgrade your hard drive if you ran yourself cables down from the motherboard and just kind of kept them here. You could upgrade your hard drive without actually even opening up the top panel, which is very cool. And there's another removable fan filter there. So these one button releases are great. You press them, you pull out the side panel, and then it comes off. This one's bound to be a little bit more solid. Yep. Just because it doesn't have that big acrylic piece on it. The way that it latches in up here is very robust, very strong. I can't imagine that that would break in any sort of real world situation. Now cable management room at the back. This is where the 900D really shines. And I mean this is where the 800D really changed the game because it added enough room for proper cable management that everyone could do without, you know, origami cabling as Voodoo PC used to call it. So check this out. That looks like more than an inch behind the motherboard tray. That means you can have a 24-pin ATX cable and something else running back here without running out of room and without having to do that thing where you force the back panel on and you can push on it in order to get it to actually close. And the funny thing is George, the designer for cases for Corsair, said to me, he showed me his hands, he went, I have really big hands, really thick fingers. I designed my cases so I can work in them. So I'm like, yeah, okay, sounds about right. So on the back you find not only all the cable management grommets you could want, which come out at the top for drives or at the top for drives, depending on whether you've got an ATX or an EATX or HPTX width board. You've got them here for your 24-pin as well as your PCI Express. Here for more PCI Express as well as cables for the drives. I love this. So many cases do this. It drives me crazy where they'll have something interfering here between the drives and the motherboard. It's like case manufacturers. Hello, we have to run cables from the motherboard to the drives. Did you not think of this? Say to cables, they're not 24, 48 inches long, they're short. So there you go. Thank you Corsair for thinking of this because there's lots of room to coil them up and hide them and keep them on these on these drive cages here. So very, very nice. You've also got plastic clips for holding cables in place and tons of these little anchors. I love these. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. These are great because they allow you to, without sort of folding things sort of under each other and all that, they allow you to take everything, route it neatly and then strap it down so that it's not so it's not ugly and gross. So even even over here, check this out. One, two, three, four, just for bringing your eight pin or your four pin up to the motherboard itself. Speaking of your eight pin or four pin, check this out. This right here is an extension cable and also an adapter. So if you have a motherboard that goes that just has a single eight pin, you can just run this as an extension and then you can tuck this one back here in your ample storage room. If you have a motherboard that takes an eight and a four, such as a Crosshair 5 formula, you can plug a single eight pin into this and plug this into the board itself. So very, very handy. Nice big CPU cutout. So you're going to have no problem installing CPU coolers that that do require a backplate without removing your motherboard. And the motherboard tray itself has a little bit of flex, but you come to expect this from motherboard trays that have all this room for cable management as well as the CPU cutout and the cable management cutouts up here. And once you actually strap a board to it, you're not going to notice any kind of a problem with that. So I'm not too worried about that particular thing. Nice little rubber grommets in here so that you're not going to see, look at these, see these noise dampening pads right here? Crosshair doesn't want this case to make noise. So they've actually included kind of a BluTac mod style thing that will keep it from having any sort of vibration. Let's finish up at the back here and then we're going to go or we'll finish up on the outside and then we're going to spend some more time on the inside. I apologize, guys. This is going to be a long video, but this is a very important case for the evolution of cases in general. I want to make sure I'm covering it adequately. It's all about cooling. So one of the criticisms of the 800D was that it didn't do air cooling as well as it did water cooling. So, of course, there has taken all that feedback and opened up every available surface all along the back. Your extra power supply plate, your IO shield, your 120 or 140 millimeter fan and the back as well as the entire top of the case. Oh, water bottle. It's all good. Is all mesh. Now, this mesh has a fine filter on it in addition to the to the cutout metal. So it's also got a reinforcement plastic bracket on it. There you go. So it's going to be nice and strong. And I think that's pretty much it for the back and the top. We'll get to more about the inside once we're on the inside. I just want to leave myself around the case in a logical way so I don't miss anything. That's really important to me. So up at the top, there we go. We've got our IO microphone, headphone, two USB 3 super speed reset button. Love to see this tucked away so where the cats won't accidentally hit it. Four USB 2.0 ports. This is great to see because so many motherboards have anywhere from sort of two to six USB 2 headers built into the inside. And it's like, what am I going to plug into this thing, you guys? None of my cases support. Well, now we have a case that supports it. So there you go. Very nice to see power buttons right here in the middle. And then you've got four five and a quarter inch expansion bays. Now you might say, oh, Linus, that's sort of odd because I thought that's what a five and a quarter inch expansion bay looks like. This is a lot bigger than five and a quarter inches. And I would go, yes, you're right. Because in order to not lose the integrity of the look of the case, I think I might need to open those from the inside. I actually don't remember how these come off from the from the video we did at CES. But in order to not compromise the look of the case, Corsair decided to widen the five and a quarter inch standard to make it sort of work for them. So I'm going to figure out how this comes off because I can't remember. All right. So we figured it out. I mean, I can actually get inside the case to work on it, which is handy because that's what I had to do. There's little tabs in the back. OK. All you got to do is release those with your fingers. Just pinch those. And then the whole thing comes out. Now you can see this is obviously much larger than a five and a quarter inch device. But what Corsair has done is they have because so few people even use five and a quarter inch devices, they want it to look clean if you don't install anything. And then they've used kind of a stylized. Oh, I might as well show you the tool list installation here, you guys. So you just peel this up, slide the drive in and then let it click into place drives in. You can screw it in with a couple of screws if you want to, too. So they've gone with a recessed bezel here that will match your five and a quarter inch device just like that. Now we pulled off the solid aluminum front piece simply by prying it up from the bottom. So you can see there's four four points here that will hold that in place. There you go. Got your nice little Corsair logo on there. And the front had a couple more little pieces of tape that were holding in another very conveniently removable fan filter. So Corsair includes not their regular class of fans with this case, but their airflow style sort of modeled after their AF series fans. So the entire front comes through this. I mean, look at what the thought they've given to this. They're like, OK, well, fans pull air from directly in front of them, but they also pull air from the side of directly in front of them as well. The whole thing's filtered. You can take this thing off, clean it, and you are good to go. So here, once I put that in place, you can see it draws air here. So you can actually if you get a bit of a better angle there, you can see from that side how there's lots of room there. And then you can also get air from the front here as well. Now you can replace these fans. You can install a triple 120 millimeter radiator up here without much difficulty whatsoever. And that is part of what will lead us to the inside of the case where we will start to investigate the water cooling options that are available. Now, speaking of water cooling options, the side of the bottom panels here, you can actually remove this solid piece. Slick pointed this out to me simply by removing the eight screws here. So that'll leave you with a mesh side on either side or both sides, giving you even more access to fresh air for the components that you're keeping inside there. Now let's go ahead and flip it down to the bottom so we can see if there's anything interesting to see down there. I don't want to let go of it here so much. So on the bottom, no, not a whole lot that is interesting down there. So there you have it. I think it makes a difference that on the older 800D, the bottom had that fan filter for your power supply, whereas the 900D uses a side mounted power supply. So it's going to draw its air from the outside of the case here or the outside of the case on the other side rather than from the bottom of the chassis. So they've included some SATA cables and I guess we'll figure out how those work in a moment. But there you go. These are the mounts that are going to hold your power supply in place and keep it from putting any unnecessary strain on the back of the chassis itself. And then this right here is an additional mounting point for more 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch hard drive or SSD mounting cages. So let's go ahead and close this up again. You know, it's interesting because I found myself closing and opening it quite frequently. But what's good is I'm able to do it quickly and efficiently because that is how you are going to upgrade your computer. You're going to want to just go flip, flip, open, open, do whatever you need to do and then move on. You don't want to spend all day every day actually working on the thing. So hard drive mounting options. You've got these little sleds here that are capable of mounting 3.5 inch drives toollessly or 2.5 inch drives by screwing them in. And then it comes with three sleds that each holds three drives. So they hold on. Let's see if I got that lined up correctly there. So we've got three in each one that clip in like that. You can see they popped out a little bit in shipping, but shouldn't be anything to worry about. Now you can install, you can actually, okay, they're modular for one thing. So you can move all your drives to the basement and then you can go ahead and install pumps or radiators or whatever other action figures. I've seen those in computers before. Up here that you want, you can take this one and move it up here and you can keep all your drives in the front. Throw some water cooling over here on this side. Throw some water cooling over here on the other side. Maybe just a small single 120 mil radiator or you can pull them all out or you can add a full additional two for 15 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives in the case natively. So those will be available from Corsair. These are those aluminum pieces that I talked about before, those supports. And I think that pretty, oh yeah, mounting, right. Okay, so mounting for radiators is awesome. So you can do up to a, okay, here, let's do all the radiators now. You can do a quad 120 millimeter radiator across here. Let's pull out these drives. You can put a power supply here and you can do a dual 120 millimeter radiator on the other side. Then you can put up to a triple 120 millimeter in the front, up to a triple 140 or quad 120 in the top. You can do a single 120 or single 140 in the back. And I think what I actually missed was this could be a triple 140 or a quad 120 as well. So the radiator mounting options, you can have up to five radiators in the case without making any modifications to it, which is absolutely outstanding. Motherboard compatibility, as I mentioned before, is pretty much unparalleled. So you can install an ITX board, an MATX board, which we'll go down to about here, an ATX board, which will be this big. And then check this out, an XLATX board, which can go all the way down from either eight or nine expansion slots here. I'm going to give you a bit of a better angle there, slick. So eight or nine expansion slots. Remember, they've included 10 expansion slots. So even with a nine expansion slot board, you could install a dual slot card in the very, very bottom slot. And then you can even install an HPTX board, which would take up pretty much the entire thing here and would allow you to really make the most of this particular beast chassis. I wonder if we've missed anything. We did show this in the top here. So you can see all those different mounting hole options depending on what you opt for up there. Let me just go sort of scan through and I'll see if we missed anything. So here's our variety of boards that we'd like to try out in the 900D. It does say on the box it's compatible with ITX, so I'm obligated to put an ITX board in there. I'm going to show you guys what it'll look like if you build a system with a single PCI Express slot and about half of ATX or half of sort of slightly wider than ATX width on it. So that's sort of ridiculous. Here's what an MATX board will look like inside. So most people are not going to go micro ATX with a system like this, but that's your four expansion slots and standard width. Next up we're going to do ATX. So this is a Crosshair 5 formula. This is one of those ones where that extension cable will come in handy. All right, so this guy right here is going to look a little something like this. So that's seven expansion slots and standard width. So you can see there's tons of room over here for much, much wider boards than a standard ATX board. Now the next one I have is a bit of a hybrid because some boards are labeled as EATX, but what they actually are is slightly wider than ATX. So you see here how there's a little bit of extra width to this board. That makes it sort of EATX, but it's also wider than normal because there are seven expansion slots, but there's a burned one here at the top. So this is actually eight expansion slots, and this is the biggest XLATX board that I had on hand. This is an X79UD7 from Gigabyte, and even that doesn't look that big in the 900D. I did miss something on the inside. So in here we've got all of our front panel connectors, our USB 2, our HD audio, our other more different USB 2, USB 3 front panel headers, as well as three SATA cables. So what I noticed is that two of the included triple hard drive cages do not have back planes, but one of them does. So if you slide that out, you can see that that is a tool-less installation, so you can pre-run. Presumably there's power over there somewhere. I think I did see it before. You can pre-run power to the back plane, pre-run SATA data to those three drives, and you can just take down this thing, pop in a drive, and you are literally ready to go without any difficulty. If you have hot swap enabled on your motherboard, you actually won't even have to turn off your computer, which is very, very cool. So we're going to put the case back together and do some size comparisons against some other chassis that we have lying around. So we're going to start with the kind of case that most normal people would be running, and this is a modest-sized ATX tower. So this is the 900D. Corsair has increased the width compared to a normal computer, and they've also dramatically increased the height and the length. So I'm going to line them up back to back so you can see the sheer size of the 900D. This is a Corsair Carbide 300R. Significantly narrower. Go ahead, get it from this angle as well, Slick, so I'm going to go ahead and adjust that for you. So you can really see you could almost probably fit two of these in here. Shrumble. In terms of the sheer volume. So we're going to tuck this one aside for now, and I'm going to show you one of our most space-efficient computers that we've ever had here at Tech Tips, and this is our Shuttle X79. It has a 6-core 3960X, 32 gigs of RAM, a Quadro 4000, and a 10 gigabit network card, and you could probably fit anywhere from five to about seven of them inside the volume of the 900D. With that said, you obviously can't do a dual socket shuttle, so there's an option that you have with the 900D that you don't have with that. Here is, of course, our Vengeance C70. So this is a pretty skookum gaming tower, and even this one. It's got up to dual 140 millimeter radiator in the top, single 140 millimeter in the back, lots of air cooling. I think it supports up to quad fans in the front, something like that. And this is what it looks like next to the 900D, and we're working our way up to the 800D next to the 900D. I have to go get one right now, though, just a sec. So just for lulls, I hauled down my rig. So this is the Silverstone TJ-07 next to it. Bear in mind, the TJ-07 doesn't look like that out of the box. I still haven't put my glass panel window on it or anything like that, but there's still a good three or four inches there that is the difference in height, and then a good few inches here. And look how much wider it is, how much wider its stance is than the TJ-07, which just has five and a quarter and then sort of a border, whereas that's pretty much the width of just the bay covers on the 900D, never minding the huge gap around here for airflow through the front of the case. Now I'm going to move my system, and we are going to show you a couple more size examples, including the BitFenix Prodigy, which is sort of a gaming-grade ITX tower with similarly sort of way too many water cooling options, but not designed for HPTX ports. So there you go. This also actually has a similar width to the 900D. I'm going to pop it up here for a sec. So you can see that the BitFenix Prodigy has kind of a wide stance, and that's because it actually holds the motherboard in it the flat way as opposed to vertically. So I don't know what the 900D's excuse is. Actually, I do know what its excuse is. The excuse is it holds a butt-ton of hardware. So there you go. That's how you could probably fit about three Prodigies and change in the 900D. And let's wrap up actually here one more practical demonstration of how big the 900D is. And you know what? It's big, but it's efficient. I did make fun of the Cosmos 2 a little bit when it was released because I said, well, this thing is so big, but the Cosmos 2 doesn't fit nearly the same caliber of hardware in it that the 900D does in terms of liquid cooling. I couldn't figure out there. I couldn't figure out what the Cosmos 2's excuse for being so big was because it didn't fit that much stuff. 900D does. We can actually put our shuttle computer right inside it without any difficulty. So there you go. We can put a couple in there. No problem. There's your Dual X79 solution. All right. So let's wrap up with a size comparison to the classic 800D. So this is Slick's personal rig. There we go. All right. And that's heavy, Slick. How do you move this thing around? So there's a liquid-cooled 800D. Actually, I'm going to put it right next to it for size comparison first, and then we'll go. So if the 800D is the biggest case you've ever seen, then the 900D will be bigger. And it will be the biggest case you've ever seen because it's definitely, definitely taken that crown from the 800D. So it is wider, taller, and it is deeper. And as all three of those things, it holds so much more hardware, though. Of course, there hasn't wasted a cubic inch of the space that they've added to the 900D because, remember, the 800D natively only supports a triple rad in the top, a single 140 in the back, and you can mount a 140 here. But other than that, the space isn't nearly as usable as the 900D. And personally, I don't miss the hot swap here because I find that the easily accessible opening door down here at the bottom and those back-planned SATA mounts back there are an equally good option compared to the older system. And it doesn't break up the clean look of the front that the 900D has. So there you have it, you guys, the new enthusiast champion from Corsair, the 900D. I hope you enjoyed this unboxing and first look. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.