 Welcome to my unboxing of the Corsair Obsidian 550D. Let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves in a billion different languages on the front. Sound dampening material, silicone mounts on the fans and hard drive bays to dampen vibration. You can cover unused fan locations to further reduce noise, rigid steel and brushed aluminum makes it easy to build a great system. You get built-in USB 3.0, 25-inch SSD support, etc., etc. Rugged durability, smart features and great looks. Let's open her up. I'm pretty familiar with this case because I actually did a presentation on stage at the NCIX first annual tech fair about the 550D, which I prepped myself for in like the two minutes before Corsair was due on stage and asked me to talk about their case for them. I've seen the 550D for more than a couple minutes at CES prior to that, so there you go. But now I know what I'm talking about in time for my actual video, which will persistently be on the interwebs forever. So that's good. Okay. Closed, or not closed rather, rigid foam, not my favorite. At least it's thick. It's not that thick. Yeah, I would have expected a little bit thicker than that. But I guess in their defense, they do have a pretty robust box that's going to keep it from getting damaged as much in shipping as can sometimes happen. We've had some interesting samples arrive for Tech Tips. We had one case that didn't use a soft foam that arrived with the back basically dented in like that. It wasn't from Corsair though, don't worry, guys. Okay. There we go. Let's go ahead and have a look at this case. So it has a very clean overall aesthetic. Actually, let's start with removing the plastic here at the front because that's going to here. Let me get you guys a... What Corsair does with their cases is they spend money on the manufacturing where it counts. So for something like their 650D or even the 800D, it's a steel case, which is fine. It's strong. Steel is good for building things out of. You build bridges out of it for crying out loud. If you can't build a case out of it, then you're probably doing it wrong. But they do a nice aluminum front bezel that looks very, very, very sleek. So I personally am a big fan of that. And let's go ahead and take this off. So you know what? One more. Right, right. So Corsair, yes, they spend the money on their cases where it counts. So the front bezel looks outstanding. And then the general rest of the case is very plain, very professional looking, and in line with what we've come to expect from Corsair products in general. So the back is pretty nondescript. You've got eight PCIe slots though. So it is XLATX compatible. You've got your IO shield. You've got a 120 or 140 millimeter fan slot. Water cooling holes, although I question the validity of these. Most people aren't running external water cooling setups. We've got a sound dampening foam mounted power supply thing. You can go one way or the other. You've got, aha, this was premiered on the 800D. So of course there's now standard dual 120 millimeter fan filtery doodads on the bottom there, which is very nice. Oh, look at these rubber feet. These are nice. They're really tall, which gives you actually enough space under the case for some legitimate airflow down here. And they're made out of a nice soft rubber. And look at these big L-shaped feet on the front as well. Very, very nice. So it's nice little touches. So that'll keep it from slipping, which is good. Okay, the front of the case. This is a cool feature. Check this out, guys. So besides the front, microphone, headphones, reset, start, hard drive LED, power LED, and front USB 3 has a cool feature. Check this out. So it opens from that side. Go ahead and take this off, which holds in place the front fan filter cover. Okay, sound dampening material here. You got an easily removable filter, which comes out probably somehow, but I don't really... It's not... Oh, oh, I think it's magnetic actually. Eh, eh, there we go. So magnetic front fan filter with dual 120 millimeter fans included. So you go ahead and throw that on there just like that. Ah, there, that's the side that's a little bit easier to remove. Very nice. Okay. So we'll go ahead and put this back and put this... Apparently I'm doing it wrong because I'm just having a lot of trouble with what is supposed to be the easiest fan filter ever, but it's like Linus proof edition. There we go. So let's go ahead and put this back and then I will get to what is actually cool about this. So once you close it, what will become fairly evident is that you can actually open it from the other side as well. So you just clip it in really firmly and then you open it from the other side. Sound dampening material is also present here, so this will help reduce noise a little bit. Another cool thing in line with the sound reduction theme of this case is the fact that there are actually very few vent holes, actually no vent holes really to speak of, in the very front of the case. And there's a reason for that. I mean there's a couple. There's the ones here down the side and there's the ones here down the other side. But the reason for that is because vent holes in the front of the case are where a lot of the noise gets passed to the user. So they've shaped the front bezel like this. See how there's a gap in there? Sort of not a very big gap, but it's a small gap so that the air will actually be pulled in from the back which will reduce the noise that you hear when the case is sitting in front of you. On the top we find more sound dampening material in here. You can actually take this off permanently if you do decide to mount fans here because obviously this solid piece of plastic would not be very conducive to air flow. So you just take this off and then you have sort of a modular interface. You've got more magnetic fan filters. You just take that off when it gets dirty and go clean it. And then that is what the top of the case will look like if you opt not to use this. Although if you wanted a case that's more air flow optimized, I'd recommend just going with a 650D or something or a 300R I believe. There was 300R in the first place instead of mucking up what I believe is the very clean looking aesthetic of this one. This is taped on as well for a very good reason because, there you go, more sound dampening material, more magnetic fan filters, and the option to mount either 120 or dual 140mm fans or what appears to be like a single, oh man that must be a single 160mm or something like that. You guys will have to just correct me if I'm wrong on that one. But either way if I was going to mount something here I'd probably go with the dual 140s just because if the theme is silence then you want to make sure that you are optimizing the build for silence which means what I would actually do is I would just leave this on because I like the stock configuration of the case. Okay, keeping with their tool-less overall philosophy they have brought back the rear buttons so we had those side clips on the 600T that wouldn't have really fit with the clean look of this case so we used the rear button in order to release the top panel. You can see lots of thick sound dampening material on the inside of the case that is once again going to reduce the noise pass to the user. I don't know how many times I can say it about a silent case but it's designed to be quiet. Again other side panel covered in sound dampening material. It's great that cases are coming with this now because I remember it wasn't that long ago you had to just buy a case and then you'd buy like sound dampening kits and they were like 50 bucks or like 100 bucks so now they're just, we'll just throw it in the case and call it a day and personally as an end user I appreciate that because it saves you money. On the inside of the case we find the usual staples for Corsair. Nice big CPU cutout so no matter where your CPU socket happens to be you'll be able to install your backplate and all that good stuff from the back. Black internal cables and little things like this so this is going to bang around. Corsair doesn't want it to scratch stuff so they go ahead and they put some foamy plasticky stuff on there for you to take care of that. All black internal cables, very very clean looking, all black interior. Hard drive mounting is done in the form of sleds so you can either mount your 3.5 inch drives with no tools whatsoever just using these little pins right here. Oh and these are rubber now too. Oh those are nice actually. Nice anti-vibration thing going on. And you have the option to either mount your drive in the middle if you've mounted a 2.5 inch SSD or on the side. That's kind of cool so they've given you the option. Okay, supports up to 4, 5 and a quarter inch bays up to 6 either 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives. You can completely remove and I'm going to need my screwdriver which happens to be right here. You can completely remove this middle one should you have the desire. I mean maybe you want to I don't know install something like a really long graphics card or something. I don't know. Oh okay hold on. Wait for it. Give me a sec here guys I'm going to have to figure this out. We got it removed there was just one more screw in the back. So you can actually remove both cages if you want although you wouldn't really have too many options in terms of installing drives. But there you go you can should you so desire maybe you just want like more air flow directly onto your graphics card and you just want to you know bolt an SSD somewhere and call it a day in terms of your boot drive. So let's go ahead and throw that back in there because I think we're done with that experiment. Right cable routing. So once again introduced with the 800D these awesome rubber grommety things that allow you to easily mount everything you want wherever you want it to go with nice tidy looking cabling. Plenty of room at the back so you can see the motherboard tray is a little bit recessed but there's tons of room here to mount your 24 pin cable and whatever other thick cables lots and lots and lots of room in the back and more than enough of these little hooks which are very actually I would say wouldn't say more than enough I could use a couple up here so I can get that up to the 8 pin or 4 pin hole right here and make it nice and tidy but we have sort of enough then let's say of these hooks for zap strapping cables down to make sure that they're nice and clean on the back so you don't have a hard time closing the back of the case. Let's have a look at what they've included in terms of accessories and what nots and of course it's taped shut. Lots of stuff check it out. Okay so the internal USB 3 header is not necessarily compatible with older boards so they've given you an adapter to plug into a USB 2 header should you so desire. Alright the umm oh boy oh oh replacement clips for the front in case you happen to like break them or something I guess. You know what I better check. Yep that's what they are so just in case you do happen to break them that's included for you we've got some fan screws we've got some hard drive screws no those aren't hard drive screws those are vibration dampening fan screws more fan screws hard drive screws power supply screws optical and SSD screws and motherboard standoffs there's also of course a manual brilliant design inside and out I think that pretty much speaks for itself when it comes to Corsair's limited track record with cases but it's been very very good so far and I think that pretty much covers it so thank you for checking out our unboxing and first look at the Corsair 550D don't forget to subscribe to whoops Linus Tech Tips from Unboxings Reviews and other computer videos.