Got the Corsair Obsidian 800D, Its HUGE!



Didn't spend a whole lot of time with the cables yet... I just wanted to get the PSU sleeved and everything moved in.

I did find out there is a small hole in the front 5.25" bay on the tool-less side for the Fan Controller I used... but corsair didn't have any black screws for that, so I had to use a silver one :( and all of the fan cables were extra long (like 2 feet instead of the normal 1ft) so it actually reached my fan controller without any extensions... was happy about that. And they're close to silent regardless of the speed I set them at.
 
Blazestorm said:
Didn't spend a whole lot of time with the cables yet... I just wanted to get the PSU sleeved and everything moved in.
Click to expand...

Lookin' good. Very nice.

Wanna sleeve my PSU for me :) Maybe we should start a Corsair Obsidian build thread?

I just black powder-coated my PCI card brackets and waiting for them to cure (see below). I got the paint and texture to match the case paint exactly. I'm also doing glossy white to replace the red heatsink/flair on the EVGA GTX 275 cards (no pics yet) for a black with white accents theme (imagine a theme that matches the Corsair logo on the front panel). Trying to get white UV reactive paint to create the words and symbols on the I/O shield, but I think it's just going to end up as straight white icons printed on adhesive paper...we'll see.

Doing sublimation dye on the rainbow colors of the PSU wires along with light sleeving (someone PM me if I can pay you to sleeve. As a dad with kids and fat fingers, this is killing me and it's taking too long).

I should have something in the case to show by the middle of the week.

dsc01015medium.jpg


dsc01011medium.jpg
 
Blazestorm said:


Didn't spend a whole lot of time with the cables yet... I just wanted to get the PSU sleeved and everything moved in.

I did find out there is a small hole in the front 5.25" bay on the tool-less side for the Fan Controller I used... but corsair didn't have any black screws for that, so I had to use a silver one :( and all of the fan cables were extra long (like 2 feet instead of the normal 1ft) so it actually reached my fan controller without any extensions... was happy about that. And they're close to silent regardless of the speed I set them at.
Click to expand...
Your side fan shroud, the one covering the fan that's pointing at the hotswap bays, isn't 100% completely on I think. It doesn't look completely horizontally level. You'll see a little hole on the front portion of the case where a little part of the plastic on the shroud inserts into. No big deal or anything, doesn't help or hurt, but just thought you'd like to know. Corsair really made getting that side shroud on perfect tricky.
 
Yea I noticed that right after taking the pic...

That one is always a pain, the other ones have guide rails that help them slide on easily.

The other problem I had is cause of the murdermod style of sleeving (I only did half of the cables, not the full length) the big bundles/transistions are behind the motherboard and it's a little thick even for the space that Corsair gives you, makes getting the other side panel on a little difficult, then again I didn't tape/tie anything down on the back.

And Dugn, I never wanna sleeve another PSU again hahaha... I actually broke one of the pins off in my 8pin connection trying to get it out... I cut off the connection and soldered on a new one from a PCI-E power adapter I had laying around, works fine, and you can't tell once it was sleeved. But I figured out the trick to getting those pins out, after I broke one of them. You gotta push the wire further into the connector first, and make sure the pin doesn't slide back into the connector when you're pushing the extractor into the plug, If you do that it will grab the tabs, and when you pull on the wire again you should hear the tabs click, then just needs a little force to pull it out.

But I might use you for powdercoating some stuff, that looks awesome (both the I/o Shield and the brackets). Or maybe a trade... haha... although my Asus I/o shield is actually mostly black, just around the edges it's silver still.
 
Blazestorm said:
Yea I noticed that right after taking the pic...

That one is always a pain, the other ones have guide rails that help them slide on easily.

The other problem I had is cause of the murdermod style of sleeving (I only did half of the cables, not the full length) the big bundles/transistions are behind the motherboard and it's a little thick even for the space that Corsair gives you, makes getting the other side panel on a little difficult, then again I didn't tape/tie anything down on the back.

And Dugn, I never wanna sleeve another PSU again hahaha... I actually broke one of the pins off in my 8pin connection trying to get it out... I cut off the connection and soldered on a new one from a PCI-E power adapter I had laying around, works fine, and you can't tell once it was sleeved. But I figured out the trick to getting those pins out, after I broke one of them. You gotta push the wire further into the connector first, and make sure the pin doesn't slide back into the connector when you're pushing the extractor into the plug, If you do that it will grab the tabs, and when you pull on the wire again you should hear the tabs click, then just needs a little force to pull it out.

But I might use you for powdercoating some stuff, that looks awesome (both the I/o Shield and the brackets). Or maybe a trade... haha... although my Asus I/o shield is actually mostly black, just around the edges it's silver still.
Click to expand...
Powdercoating is pretty durable and will last for ages, but good old prime and paint is pretty good.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Redbeard any more reports on shipping?
Click to expand...

Containers are on boats. Boats are headed towards continents. Some sooner than others due to the pesky laws of physics.

I can't give you guys specific dates, but we should be getting more units to retailers and etailers in the next week or two in the US.
 
Redbeard: I know it's early on the plate, but have you given any thoughts to what type of case the next Corsair offering would likely be? I know many in the circles I frequent would jump all over something at a smaller scale that had the type of thought put into its design like the 800D has seen.
 
DarkStryke said:
Redbeard: I know it's early on the plate, but have you given any thoughts to what type of case the next Corsair offering would likely be? I know many in the circles I frequent would jump all over something at a smaller scale that had the type of thought put into its design like the 800D has seen.
Click to expand...

In order to further market ourselves into the niche "let's not sell in any huge quantities here" market, we're going to be releasing a solid platinum (but black powder coated) mini-ITX case which will sell for $37,500 US.

Okay - that's a joke. We're looking at a variety of things - I don't want to tip our hat, of course, but there's been stuff in development for months now. The dev cycle on cases is very long. From concept to vendor selection to industrial design to tooling and then the even longer feeling process that is Pre-tooling sample, T1, T2 and T3 samples, golden samples - it takes a long time. Especially if you've never done it before.

The Obsidian 800D was originally kicked off in early 2008 - and here we are selling it in Sep 2009. Granted - we could have sold it in March if we'd wanted to, but it wouldn't have been as good a product. It would've had the wrong I/O shield in the front, slightly off-kilter 5.25" bay covers, a poorly designed CPU backplate cutout, fans with red, yellow, and black wires, etc.

But all these little changes take time to perfect. That being said - we learned a lot on the Obsidian 800D. We know what to look for, now.

And we know the things people love and the things people don't love. And the things we put tons of thought into that are barely even mentioned. But sometimes that's the way things go.
 
I like the 800D a lot, the only things I felt were "off" would have been.

The hot-swap bays... there is never going to be a time where I'd use these, I think most other people setup their system and leave it. Hot-swap makes sense in a server environment where you can't have downtime / can't pull the server out of the rack so you can swap out failing drives without taking the entire system apart or even turning it off.

But for a gaming system it just seems like 1 more thing that could fail. I bet you could have fit 8 3.5" bays internally along with a couple fan's to keep the drives cool (You could have still had a seperate chamber for them, just no hot-swapping). Along with some rubber mounts for the drives. The hot-swap cage isn't as loud as my brother's Antec 300 (which has a ridiculous amount of HDD noise), but it's louder than my LianLi or HAF922 was with the same drives. Maybe it's because they're sitting closer to the front/exterior of the case.

And then the I/o shield on the front, although I like how it can be hidden, when it's opened it looks not as refined as the rest of the case. I don't use my front ports that often so it's not a big deal for me, but still something that could be improved on.

Just small suggestions, the rest of the case I'm liking so far, and I hope you guys continue to design more cases / build high quality stuff :)

Certain segments are sort of untapped... like mini-ITX storage based cases... a lot of people are getting small, low power atom mini-itx motherboards and then stuffing as many HDD's as they can into a case, the problem is there are no mini-itx/atx cases that would fit that kind of market... maybe make it a M-ATX not to limit yourselfs... but 8-10 hot-swap bays in there would sell if priced appropriately. (Because you can get a 4u rackmount with 20 hot-swap bays for under $300) but obviously you can't sell a high quality / well designed compact case with half as many bays for < $150.

Another one to consider is something like the Lanbox or the Fragbox (basically Sugo SG01) but slightly modified. It retails higher than the 800D though and it's a micro-ATX case with a single 80mm fan I think. I've been trying to find one that looks nice w/ handle and so far those are really my only two options... Unless I want to modify a different one.

Sort of rambling
 
Very nice case, love the backside mobo access. To be honest I wanted one until I saw just how big it actually was. If it were about 1/3 smaller I'd jump on it. I really like the grommets for running cables in and out.
 
Ya its an awesome case but its way too big.. and the hot swap bays are completely worthless for myself.
 
The size is the reason most are buying it, and there are actually some complaints that it isn't big enough. I wouldn't mind it being slightly smaller however I got tired of working in cramped cases and it is not that much bigger then my current case (Cooler Master Sniper). I will not use the hot swap bays to hot swap, but I do like the access to the hard drives. Swapping hard drives is the number 1 reason I go into my case and with my current case I have to remove both sides to swap hard drives. I plan on this being the last case I buy for some time. Of, course I said the same thing when I bought the Sniper;)
 
Redbeard said:
...And the things we put tons of thought into that are barely even mentioned. But sometimes that's the way things go.
Click to expand...

I'm curious what some of those are.

Some reasons I really, really like this case are things few people mentioned in any of the reviews:
  • The case window hides the drives bays - so often, windowed cases glaringly show the drives bays which, 99% of the time, aren't interesting to look at.
  • Rubber Insulator for all Fans - Each fan has a rubber vibration dampener - and there's even a spare for an additional 120mm fan if you choose to add one (or repalce the 140mm in the back to a more standard 120.
  • Black Powder Coating Paint - Not only is this throughout the unit (except the front panel), it is in every crevice. You didn't cheap out and make the motherboard tray or bays steel. You cover the whole thing is glorious, consistent black.
  • Bottom Intake and HUGE Dust Filter - not only is the coolest air in the room going to be on the floor, but you made it easy as pie to remove and clean a single filter for the entire machine. Nice.
  • Black Cables - Beyond simply matching the black theme, you used cables that aren't rainbow colored and you didn't cheap out on breaking the black theme with cheap cables. Not only are the included cables really clean-looking, I like that thay match the Corsair PSU theme in the 1000HX - black wires throughout clean enough to not even need sleeving if you don't want to.
  • Options Galore Above - Whether you use the 3x 120mm fan holes above, use them for a one or more fans or put in an entire 3x radiator, the top venting is open to more options than any other case I've ever seen.
  • Brilliant Addition of Air Cooling Zones - People who rely on air cooling usually have to deal with whatever air cooling zones exist in a case - and none of them have ever been really impressive. You not only split the PSU and motherboard into thier own zones which is more common in some cases - you further isolated the HDDs into their own zones that vent completely separate from the other two zones. Awesome.
  • Black Screws - Again, the packgaes of black screws (and the extra long ones for the 120mm int he bottom drive bay) continue the black theme so it didn't look like you cheaped out on non-matching parts.
 
Last edited:
Will there be a panel with no window ?

This is the only reason why I dont buy it. I dont like windows
 
~ever~ said:
Will there be a panel with no window ?

This is the only reason why I dont buy it. I dont like windows
Click to expand...

This has been covered numerous times in the thread. They will sell a non-windowed panel on thier website for the Obsidian 800D at some point.
 
curlysir said:
The size is the reason most are buying it, and there are actually some complaints that it isn't big enough. I wouldn't mind it being slightly smaller however I got tired of working in cramped cases and it is not that much bigger then my current case (Cooler Master Sniper). I will not use the hot swap bays to hot swap, but I do like the access to the hard drives. Swapping hard drives is the number 1 reason I go into my case and with my current case I have to remove both sides to swap hard drives. I plan on this being the last case I buy for some time. Of, course I said the same thing when I bought the Sniper;)
Click to expand...


not big enough... wow...
 
I agree that a larger case with great features will last longer than smaller cases.

This case will get better when Corsair starts to have improved replacement parts in the coming months, like tool-less hard drive caddies, I/O w/ esata or USB 3.0, wheels or standard case feet, and all black extension cables so users can keep the all black look without having to sleeve their cables i.e. 24 pin and PCI cables.
 
Any helpful ideas to mount two SSDs in the hot-sway bays? Turns out that if there's any depth to the mounting screws at all, the hot-swap bay doesn't slide back into into slot.

Anyone else had any luck mounting SSds into the hot-swap bays? The included Corsair case screws are not threaded right for the Corsair X128 SSDs and they're way too deep to even work if they were threaded right...

Reusing Nordic's pic since it shows the issue well:
dsc0060gr.jpg
 
dugn said:
That much is obvious.

Do you have a link? I've searched for a bit and can't find any.
Click to expand...

You need machine threaded screws. That's about all I can tell you. My Silverstone cases came with them. As did my Silverstone SSD mounting kits. You could just pickup a couple of those and get the screws you need.
 
Dan_D said:
This has been covered numerous times in the thread. They will sell a non-windowed panel on thier website for the Obsidian 800D at some point.
Click to expand...

I didnt see it on the thread at all. Maybe because the thread is HUGE and I didnt read the whole thing.

Well, Looks like this case will be replacing my Praetorian!!
 
~ever~ said:
I didnt see it on the thread at all. Maybe because the thread is HUGE and I didnt read the whole thing.

Well, Looks like this case will be replacing my Praetorian!!
Click to expand...

That's true. If you haven't been keeping up with it I can see how you might have missed it. In any case, there will be a non-windowed side panel for sale on Corsair's website according to Redbeard. (Corsair rep.)
 
to those that own one of these: how have you found it for fan / hdd noise?
 
noise isn't too bad @ all and I have 3 antec fans donated from my sons antec 1200 @ the top of my 800D =P

some pics, sorry I'll post more when I get my camera back from my wife...well better pics as these were taken w/ my pda


image147t.jpg

image148y.jpg
 
Last edited:
Just put in 3x 120mm CCFLs with 2x 12" tubes waiting. Here's the inside of my build so far. Still lots left to do:

  • 2x EVGA GTX 275's being cutomized in white - waiting to cure
  • Place 2x CCFL tubes
  • Work on the rat's nest in the back

dsc01073medium.jpg


dsc01078medium.jpg
 
The Corsair rep identified some small improvement that could be coming to the Obsidian, like some anti vibration "pads" for the PSU. Anyone know if the improvements will be available with the next shipment of are they reserved for an updated revision?
 
I'm pretty sure my niece would fit in this case...thing is huge!!!

By the way, what memory cooler is that? Are they even worth it if you don't OC?
 
Z(+)DIAC said:
I'm pretty sure my niece would fit in this case...thing is huge!!!

By the way, what memory cooler is that? Are they even worth it if you don't OC?
Click to expand...

Corsair Dominator RAM. I will be OC'ing. Otherwise they're just pretty (and expensive) sticks that support Intel's Extreme Memory Profiles.
 
Those CCFL fan's look awesome. Great idea for positioning to illuminate the case.
 
alcuin said:
Those CCFL fan's look awesome. Great idea for positioning to illuminate the case.
Click to expand...

Thx. Means a lot coming from you.

I initially wanted to black out the Corsair logo on the front of the case and on the H50. Then I figured I'd embrace it instead since ALL BLACK isn't very interesting. I'll post a build log and final pix when I'm done, but it's a very black and white theme (i.e., mostly black with white accents) which makes the Corsair white logos look like they were deliberate and intentional instead of a bothersome eyesore.

Plus - everyone's got green, red or blue case lighting. White - not so much...
 
Just received notice that the case preordered from Newegg with an ETA of 9-25-09 will ship today. Hopefully it will arrive in good shape.

Edit: Newegg actually shows this item in stock now!
 
Last edited:
Heh weird Dugn... I had the same idea to use some white cathodes in mine...

I was planning on hiding them maybe on the sidepanel so you can't see the cathodes themselves, but you can see the lighting from them. That and I sleeved my wires / got extensions so I can hide the cathode box (probably where the 2 bottom HDD's usually go)
 
Redbeard mentioned having the best results with air cooling by adding three exhaust fans at the top, changing the back into an intake and aiming the heatsink fans towards the top. That sounds great for the ambient and CPU, but wouldn't this cause too much negative pressure and making it harder on the GPU with only the bottom intake fan helping to cool it?

If so, would I just be better off getting something like a HAF if I'm primarily using my computer as a multimedia/gaming system? I most likely will never have more than three hard drives, one optical and one graphics card, at least for the short term. I really like the concept of this case, and it really seems like the last case you would ever need for a very long time and any upgrade path is covered, but I'm wondering if it's just overkill for the majority right now.

I have all of the components needed for a new system just sitting on my floor waiting for a case, and I really don't want to spend an extra $160 on something only to find out it's actually less effective cooling than another choice that could be had for less. Not even worried about the CPU temps nearly as much as the motherboard and GPU either.
 
More shipments went out yesterday and today. Stock should show up at US resellers very soon.
 
Heh, I just checked Newegg and sure enough I was charged for the case. I'm not going to cancel it and just bite the bullet I suppose. If GPU temps ever become a problem I'm sure there will be a solution via new side panel or watercooling. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top