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Corsair Carbide 240 AIR Computer Case Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by leeghoofd @ 2014-10-01

Corsair has been bombarding the MadShrimps reviewers with loads of new stuff since Computex 2014. Since motherboard brands are including mATX and even mITX boards in their lineup we see more and more of these tiny form factors appear at LAN parties. Portability is a big added bonus if you are a frequent LAN party visitor. Enclosure manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon and are including more frequently mITX cases. One of the biggest drawbacks of these tiny cases is the limited internal airflow, thus the heat buildup and stability of your favorite hardware components are compromised. Corsair has developed a shrinked-down version of their magnificent Carbide 540 AIR. The Carbide 240 AIR is again a two chamber cube, designed for maximum cooling and hardware compatibility, yet this time in a tiny form factor.

Test Setup and Temp Measurements

For the test setup we have to thank first of all Tones for supplying us with the Intel i7-4770K CPU and the ASUS Z97 mITX motherboard. The installed hardware was comprised of following parts:

Intel i7-4770K cooled by boxed cooler
ASUS Z97i plus motherboard
16GB of CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 2400C10 memory
ASUS AMD 7970HD video card
2 x Western Digital Green Caviar 1TB HDD
1 x Samsung Pro 512GB SSD
CORSAIR RM650 PSU

Obtaining a clean build is a no-brainer in a dual chamber cube case. On one side we find the motherboard and other vital hardware parts alike the graphics card. On the other side the power supply and the storage devices are installed, Cable clutter is also for this particular chamber. The build took us under 15 minutes to achieve, so if we can do it so can you ;) Too bad Corsair left out the support for any optical drive as there's plenty of space to do so.

The picture above picture tells the tale, there's ample room to tuck away them power supply cables, only route the PCIe GPU cable, the 24 and 8 pin motherboard connector and you are good to go. Power supplies up to 225mm are supported. Too bad Corsair still hasn't listened to our feedback on the 250D case, hooking up more than two fans on most mITX boards is a no go, so a fan splitter needs to be bought separately, unless your motherboard has got three extra fan headers on-board. The ASUS Z97i Plus motherboard only has two, so we were one short, Molex to fan splitter for the win!

So how did the Carbide 240 AIR do in our brief temperature test? Just looking at the chart below it doesn't disappoint! However we feel Corsair might have missed a golden opportunity here; by utilizing slightly higher performance fans and the inclusion of an integrated fan controller this case would have been a cooling monster packed in a tiny cube size... However due to the uncluttered nature of the hardware chamber even the triple stock fan setup does quite a good job at keeping your hardware well below the melting point.

Acoustic-wise the used fans are a good balance between noise and performance, though the setup is audible due to its highly ventilated nature. If we have to live with only this as a negative point, than I will happily take that.

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