 Welcome to my unboxing of the Corsair Carbide Series 300R. I first had the pleasure of laying eyes on this case at CVS 2012 and now I have one here in, well, I can't really call it the studio because it's just at home where I happen to have some light set up so that I can shoot some videos. But here I have it somewhere where I can show it to you guys. So let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves. The Carbide Series 300R is a compact expression of the Corsair philosophy. Great systems begin with a great case. Open the easy access side panel and find a builder friendly design with three tool free optical drive bays and four tool free hard drive bays with integrated 2.5 inch SSD compatibility. There's room for extra long graphics cards and it keeps your hardware cool with amazing air flow including 140mm front fan and 120mm rear fan which should be compatible with the H80 as well. Okay, and dust filters are removable for features much like this, make the foundation of your next system. Okay, interesting. So let's go ahead and get it opened up. You know what, give me a sec here guys. Now that we've got it out of the box we can have a bit of a look at this particular chassis. It does come packed in a hard foam. I do prefer a more soft foam because it can be a little bit more robust during shipping especially once the system is fully loaded. Although as you can see by the way I'm manhandling it, this case is not that heavy so it is far less of a concern than it is with heavy cases and they've gone with more than inch thick foam so 99.99% of the time it's going to be fine. And remembering that shipping is more of an issue in Canada than it is almost anywhere else just because of the size of this country and how sparsely populated it is. So cases often travel very far before they eventually reach the intended recipient. So what else we got included here? A bit of a quick start guide but that's about it. So let's go ahead and buckle down here. So the first thing we see is the front of the case which has, and I'm a big fan of this actually, it has that plastic brushed thing going on and I'm going to show you guys, yeah, I'm going to show you guys why I like that so much. And it's going to involve me moving this computer which has my cat perched on it and then moving my backpack which is in the way of this door in here. So no, no, you don't have to follow me in here. I'm just going to bring out a brushed aluminum side panel from my case. So here, ha ha, you're going to need to get the light just right but you can see all along the back edge of this side panel are fingerprints. Can you see that? Can you see the blemishes in the finish? Yeah, you can kind of see it there in that shot. You can kind of see it here. Okay, so why don't I just wipe them off? And the answer is because I cannot. You cannot completely clean brushed aluminum because what happens is the oils and acids in your fingers etch into that anodized brushed aluminum finish and you cannot completely clean it. So I love this plastic brushed thing. It's the same as on the back of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 because it looks good. It's lighter than metal, although not by much. Aluminum doesn't weigh much. And as much as you touch it, you can actually clean it off. So sorry, I've harped on that enough. Let's keep going. I love the industrial look of this design of this case overall. You can see these little, I mean they're just for aesthetics but they look like kind of, you know, yeah, like kind of industrial with these bolt things going on here. We've got three 5.25 inch bays, power and reset switches, headphones and microphone, two USB 3.0 ports, and then we have a front thing which I'm not 100% sure how it works although I felt some kind of a something going on down there. What's that? I haven't actually taken this apart. I've only seen it on demo at the Corsair Suite, so pardon me for my ignorance here, guys. Yeah, okay. So what is this down here? Nothing, apparently. Okay, so we have a removable fan filter which is not that easy to remove, frankly. That's kind of a shame. So you do have to peel back some tabs in order to get that to come off. Although you'll be able to blow it out sort of 99% of the time and then I guess if you really wanted to wash it, you can take it off. Other than that, the inside is pretty run-of-the-mill. This is interesting though. This is a nice touch. Instead of going with plastic security pieces for the panels, Corsair has gone with these Pronged Metal pieces. And I don't know if you guys noticed, but in my unboxing of the Shinobi XL, I actually, when I took off the top panel without even realizing it immediately, I broke off those plastic pieces. So this is the kind of thing that addresses a concern that I sort of had about cases in general because I've never seen this before, before I even had a chance to talk to anyone about it. So that's really cool. Kudos Corsair. Way to go. So dual 120s or 140s, it comes with 140mm fan. You can throw another one in there to put cooling over your hard drives. There's a fair bit of restriction on these fans, but they've done a little bit to alleviate this problem by putting in some perforations here in addition to the holes that you see on most cases right here. So let's go ahead and work our way around the side. We find a pretty standard looking side panel over there. On the other side, we find dual 120s or 140s on the other side. So you can use that to cool your graphics card. On the bottom, we find a filter for the bottom intake power supply as well as nice grippy rubber feet. And on the back of the case, we find, once again, a pretty run of the mill design. So we've got our 120mm exhaust with, oh this is interesting, so they've bulged out the 120mm grill a little bit to give you a bit more room between the back of the fan and the grill. This not only reduces the turbulence and increases the airflow it's able to push through, but it also reduces the noise. Just a little FYI for you guys. Some perforations here, bottom mounted power supply and everything's looking pretty hunky dory in there. Here we have dual 120s or dual 140s. Would have preferred to see the 120s centered and seeing a couple more holes put in it just so that if you're running a radiator such as an H100, you would be able to have that radiator centered because you can see it. And hold on a second. I just gotta throw this mouse for my cat who is bothering my filming assistant. Alright, there we go. Let's put the front back on before we get too much further here because I do want you guys to, I want you guys to appreciate the case's finished design rather than just, you know, with me having torn it apart already. More ventilation here on the sides. So that is how those front 140mm fans are getting all their airflow. Not only from these sides, but also the mesh in the front as well as this hole in the bottom. So very, very good access to fresh air for those fans. Alright, here we go. Take off those thumb screws, the side panels, pull off the side panel. So this is a more value oriented case, but Corsair still managed to keep the side panel reasonably strong, although it is nothing compared to, you know, something like the 650D or the 800D which are obviously very, very high grade cases. Go ahead and take off this other side panel as well. Give you guys a brief look at the other side here. There you go. That is a huge CPU cutout. So no matter where your CPU socket is located on your board, remember every time the, uh, every time the CPU socket changes, the average sort of usual locations tend to shift around a little bit. So they've planned for the future, giving you as much space as they possibly can. In terms of cable management room, you can see we have a fair bit of space back there. We've got an entire thumb width, which is a pretty good indicator that we should be able to fit a 24-pin connector back here with no issues whatsoever. We've also got cable management holes here, here, here, and here, allowing us to also here for the 8-pin access the optical drives, the hard drives, any other kinds of drives we might install in the front of the case. That's about it. I wouldn't have minded seeing another cutout here, maybe on a, like, a revision, you know, 1.1 or something like that because some other boards these days do have the 8-pin in the middle and unless you have a power supply with a very long cable, you might not make it all the way sort of over here from that hole. So just something to bear in mind. Although, oh no, look at this. Ha, they thought of that. You can probably run it through here, no problem, because you can see where the motherboard mounts are, so you should be able to squeeze it in there. All right, what else we got on the back? This can serve as routing for your front panel audio because most motherboards have that located over there, although you might have to cheat a little bit and push it through before you put the power supply in, stuff like that, and I think that covers it for this side of the case. Yes, it does. Okay, let's flip it around here. So here's our toolless 5.25 inch base. Here is the enormous space that we have in this case, accommodating up to 450 millimeter graphics card. I mean, imagine that. It would be like this much longer than a motherboard, so I don't think that's coming anytime soon, but there you go. Corsair will be ready for it, regardless. Okay. We've also got our 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch hard drive mounts. So there are the 2.5 inch mounting holes. These don't look that strong, but trust me, once you put a drive in them, they are significantly more robust. Here's how Corsair ships the accessories and doodads. So let's have a look at what we got in here. Some zip ties for cable routing, some screws. We're not getting a whole lot of extras, but there isn't a whole lot to supply. I mean, something like an 800D comes with cables for the hot swap and stuff like that, but this doesn't really have that. Does this come out? No, it doesn't. I mean, other than that, I think we've pretty much covered it. I mean, you got your dual 140s in the front, you got your dual 140s up here, you got your 120 back here, you got your 120 built into the power supply here. This is a very, very capable case, and Corsair always does such a good job with these little details, even on their value cases. Black interior, all black cables down to the connectors on the very end. Front USB 3 is with an internal header, which they all should have been from day one, but no one could decide on a standard. And I think that pretty much wraps it up. This is going to just, if you want my opinion, these are just going to clean up in that sub hundred dollar case market because it doesn't come down necessarily to the materials that are used. It's a steel case with a plastic front bezel, but it comes down to the design and the engineering that goes into it because it looks really good, and I've seen high-end builds done in this case already. It does not look like a sub-one hundred dollar case once you put some decent hardware in it, so that's kudos to Corsair on this one. So thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look at the Corsair 300R. Don't forget to subscribe for Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer...