With the Carbide series Corsair is able to adress yet another public then with it's fancy high end, but also more expensive, Graphite and Obsedian lineup. A public that still wants to own a high quality chassis, but at a more affordable price level. The 400R retailing around 90 euros, for the 500R you will have to cash out plus minus 105 euros. But to be honest you get a far more complete package in my book with the 500R. Let's start with the big 200mm sidefan, extra cooling for the vital parts of the motherboard and the installed GPU(s). The foreseen top cutout for eg the Hydro, all in one cooling solutions, series is very nice to have. The 3 step fan controller adds up to the value too. But it would have been recommendable to have more free connectors for eg the rear fan and optional top or bottom fans.

The two removable Hard Drive cages or bays allow you to install very long graphic cards. Or remove one to optimise the air flow straight onto the GPU('s). Removing one bay will limit your hard drive capacity to 3 HDDs, but for most PC users that's more than plenty.

The abundance of motherboard tray cutouts either facilitates easy CPU cooler installation and/or makes cable management pure childs play. The only major drawback of this case is that it is limited to ATX and mATX motherboards. If you have an E-ATX motherboard, like the Rampage 3 Extreme, you will have small installation woes as the motherboard's PCB will touch the rear tray and might slightly bend the PCB. The addition of a side panel dust filter should be adressed in future case revisions.

All in all this is a sleek and well designed case. The Carbide series are by no means lacking in build quality. It's the little details, like eg the rubber damped fans, that set these Corsair cases apart from some of the cheaper imitations/versions. The cooling is top notch and leaves close to no options open for improvement. Maybe a bit more silent fans could have topped it all off, but the excellent cooling performance makes us a bit more forgiving.

The Arctic White paint job makes this case stand out from the crowd. The Black interior coating is the icing on the cake. The black/white combo makes it all look very professional. Plus if you devote some time to cable management you can build yourself a very lean, clean and well cooled PC. The Carbide 500R is not perfect, but it comes darn close.

Pros :

• Excellent cooling capacity
• High quality build
• Onboard Fan controller
• Removable HDD cage(s) to support extra long videocards
• USB3.0 to 2.0 Adaptor included
• Easy cable management

Cons :

• Lacking side panel dust filter
• Only official mATX and ATX mobo supported
• Fans could be a bit more silent