A Closer Look - Outside

A first look at the chassis has it come across as quite compact for what it is meant to hold. Corsair's special coating on the plastic should be a good guard against fingerprints. Things are quite edgy overall, which looks great in combination with the metal mesh. The plastic is unfortunately quite soft, and I would have liked more reinforcements on them in certain spots, as they flex easily under pressure.


The Carbide Air 540's front looks, well, sexy. Absolutely straight lines; hard, angled edges, and the mesh that runs across the front and top, flowing from front to top in a seamless line, make it look great. The rear reveals how Corsair managed to keep the chassis short by moving the now upright PSU bay from below the motherboard tray to the left.


There is one very large window on the side where the motherboard will be. While this would be bad on a normal chassis because it would reveal cables and ugly optical drives, there are no external drive bays on this side, giving you a great view of all the cool components in your system, such as a water-cooling loop. The other side panel is much simpler and only has an air vent to give the installed PSU access to fresh air.


The two covers for the external 5.25" bays line up perfectly with the frame, leaving just a tiny gap around the edges. Corsair has equipped the Carbide Air 540 with the usual audio I/O in the form of metal (not plastic) plugs and a pair of USB 3.0 connectors. While this is quite basic, it should sufficie for most users.


There is a lot of unused space in the rear's top-left corner. Corsair could have put a 3.5" hard drive cage behind this air vent to give the unit more than the two 3.5" trays. Below it is the standard-sized PSU bay with two sets of mounting holes, which gives you the option of either installing the PSU with the fan facing to the left or right. Next to this are the eight motherboard slots, and in the top-right corner is a single 140 mm exhaust fan. There are no water-cooling holes, but the Air 540 doesn't, as we will see later on, need such holes.


The top almost looks like the front, with the smooth half out of plastic and that same mesh cover next to it carrying on that same look. You may remove the cover, which reveals mounting holes for two 120 or 240 mm fans or 240/280-based liquid cooling systems, like the Corsair H100 or H110. On the underside are two clearly visible internal 3.5" bays. It would have been good of Corsair to place some dust filters here to keep things within as clean as possible for as long as possible.