Corsair 400C Black Steel (clear) REVIEW

Mohenjo · February 10, 2017

Corsair 400c (black) Review

Disclosure – This is my first written review of any product, I usually don’t do reviews but I noticed that there aren’t a ton of reviews on this case so that’s why I’m going to do one here, whether any one uses it or not doesn’t matter, I just hope I can answer a few peoples questions. I am going to try to keep this review short though, so enjoy

My specs (for comparison)

- MSI z170 a – pro

- Sapphire 290x tri – x

- 16gb of ddr4 patriot 2400mhz

- 1tb WD Blue / Sandisk 240gb ssd

- Hyper 212 evo

- Raidmax Blackstone 700w (I know)

Let’s start with a simple pros and cons list

PROS –

- The aesthetic, though this may be a personal thing I LOVE smaller sized cases, and the fact that this one could easily hold my tri – x 290x was amazing, my buddy even managed to fit 2 390x’s in there. The side panel as well just makes it super slick and nice looking.

- Cable management is fantastic I would say there are more pros then cons here but there is one thing that did bug me that I will mention in cons, and this could be a deal breaker for some unless you can get around it.

- Price is great, Some might say that 100 bucks for a case isn’t good deal but you are get a whole lotta case in such a small package, I would say its defiantly worth it (especially if you can pick it up for 70 bucks like I did)

- The expansion ability in this case is great, It can fit a pretty beefy water cooler in there, and you can actually adjust the placement of the power supply shroud to give you more room for a RAD in the front of the case (or maybe just an extra fan)

- The PSU shroud is great, although my PSU is semi mod and that helped a lot in this build, I feel you could do just fine with a non-modular power supply as the hard drive shroud can be adjusted to fit more cabling into the shroud, plus it has a little convenient cutout in the shroud to run some cables through

- Overall, a nice case, but it has some quirks that could be easily fixed….

CONS –

- The issue I mentioned in the PROs that could be a deal breaker is this, when I was cable managing I realized that I could not zip tie the cables properly to the back without removing the 3 ssd bays on the back, it was super inconvenient but I realized that it wasn’t an issue for me because I just threw the ssd into the hard drive cage, but I could see how this could a pretty big issue for some, if your creative you can probably get around it but its would’ve been a lot easier to move it to the side.

- Another small quirk was 50 percent my fault and 50 percent the cases fault, after putting almost the entire computer together it was time to put the front panel connecters on, and there ate 3 little holes under the motherboard that can be used to route cables from the back, but to my amazement none of the cables would fit, if there were even a mm bigger I would have been able to fit the HD audio cable and hid it, but after spending 2 hours building I was not ready to take it all apart just for one cable. So I ended up routing it through the PSU shroud and it doesn’t look all that great, but again half of that was my own fault

- Another small con for the case is the fact that it SCREAMS for any type of LED, I didn’t realize that the side panel was a Smokey window not a clear one, but installing an RGB strip fixed all that and I was planning to do that at some point anyway.

In-between –

There are a couple of things about this case that are neither good nor bad, just some things to note.

- One of those things is the fact that the way the airflow is pushed through this case is through the bottom, which can be an issue for people who keep it on their desk, but I had it there for a week and I didn’t run into any issues but I ended up moving it to a separate desk anyway

- The USBs are upward facing and there are only 2 of them which is fine for me but can be an issue for some

Building tips –

- Make sure you plan a little ahead with this case and that everything fits correctly, I didn’t and ran into a few issues

- Don’t take off the plastic covering the side panel until you finish, not only is it a nice thing to do once it’s all done but even if you take it off it attracts finger prints pretty easily (like all side panels)

- I would recommend a magnetic screwdriver If you have a large CPU cooler, makes life easier (I didn’t use one though)

Conclusion –

- In conclusion, I thoroughly recommend this case, especially if you prefer a smaller footprint, if you plan ahead you wouldn’t really run into any of the issues I did. I prefer this case over the 400c but the s340 is a strong competitor. If you are a fan of corsair, I definitely recommend this. And if you prefer a larger case there is the 600c for around 150$. I hope that this helped someone out and if you have any questions you can PM me. See ya

P.S - a couple pics of my build, excuse the desk cable management, will fix it some day

http://imgur.com/a/NPUjr