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Corsair Carbide AIR 540 Computer Case Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by leeghoofd @ 2013-07-11

During COMPUTEX 2013 CORSAIR introduced a few new enclosures, the Carbide 330R and the 540 AIR version. While the first is more a refinement of exiting designs, the new 540 AIR sports a revolutionary design for mass production cases. The concept behind this case is that the case is divided in two halves. One side houses the mainboard, graphics card and cooling devices. The second compartment leaves room for HDD/SSDs, optical drives and the power supply. Thus the airflow is maximized for the hotter running components of your favourite hardware. The big custom made cube cases, in particular the UFO series from Mountain Mods are the foundation for these particular multi-compartment designs. However CORSAIR seems to have pulled it off to bring this design to the masses at a fraction of the cost.

The Build, Temperature and Noise Measurements

The assembly was as straight forward as it ever could be. The Carbide 540 Air is a real joy to work in, as it has plenty of space and doesn't need a modding specialist to create a clean, clutterless PC. The Hydro 110 perfectly blends in, with room to spare for even a push and pull setup. Storage wise the two hot swappable drives are a nice addition, again one of them little things that makes this case truly stand out from the crowd.

There's no need to make it tidy and clean on the other side :p That the front dust works efficient is pretty obvious in the below pictures.

Let's take a look how this case handles the Hexacore crunching prime95 at 4500MHz. Due to the maximized airflow all the vital components inside your PC remain well cooled. On the motherboard sensors we notice a 3-4°C lower operating temperature then with other tested cases. The H110 has no issues to keep the CPU sub 70°C inside this well ventilated Carbide case. Weirdly enough the included 140mm FANs are not as quiet as one might suspect. They are audible when running full blast, our noise measurement test, conducted at 1meter, indicated 30dBa

Thus we retested the same setup, however this time with the motherboard taking over the fan control. The FAN speed was reduced to +/-900rpm in stead of the 1140rpm at 12V. The noise level went down to +/- 27dBa. The impact on cooling performance was minimal as you can spot in the below graph.

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