Building a System

The Corsair Carbide 400R is a mid-tower case, and traditionally these have rather tight interiors. To really test it, I decided to move my entire Intel system, comprising an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard and two NVIDIA GTX580 graphics cards, one SSD, three hard drives, two optical drives, and a 3.5" card reader into this case. Initially it looked as if the motherboard would fit perfectly.

However, the Rampage III Extreme is slightly larger than the standard ATX form factor. A standard ATX motherboard is 12" wide and 9.6" deep, but the Rampage III Extreme is 10.6" deep (which ASUS disingenuously calls "ATX form factor" on their web site). As such the SATA ports bump right up against the edge of the slightly recessed motherboard area. This makes it impossible to use the lower SATA ports.

Well, this is why there are Dremel tools. After removing a few inches of metal I could easily access all the SATA ports, and a bit of plastic tubing covers the sharp metal edge. Realize that this is not a strike against the Carbide 400R as the specifications for the case clearly state it's for mATX and ATX motherboards only, and the Rampage III Extreme is not a standard ATX motherboard.

There's plenty of room in back for all your cables.

All my components fit easily, with room to spare...which makes me wonder why I'd need a larger case...

I did run into two problems: first, the two right screw holes on my Corsair HX850 power supply didn't line up with the cutouts on the case. I solved this by using a razor blade to carefully shave a little material off the rubber power supply supports inside the case. This was probably a manufacturing glitch and I wouldn't expect to see it in another example.

More perplexing was the problem I ran into trying to mount a couple of side panel fans: Corsair provides a package of 12 long fan screws, which the instructions specify can be used to mount a fan "in any position". These screws are just long enough to protrude through a standard 25mm thick fan as shown below.

The problem is twofold: one, these are machine screws, and Corsair doesn't supply any nuts to secure the ends of the screws (they're not listed in the accessories list in the documentation). Second, while the screw is long enough to make it through a 25mm fan, it's not long enough to make it through a rubber fan mount grommet, the case side panel, and the fan, so you wouldn't be able to use them even if nuts were supplied. Regular self-tapping fan screws won't work because their heads are too small and slip right through the grommeted holes provided in the side and rear panels; Corsair's own fans are mounted with self-tapping screws that have extra-wide heads so they'll work with the large screw holes in the case. I wound up using some rubber "pull through" fan mounts, which worked well enough to mount a couple of side panel fans.

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