Review System

Assembly

Installing a motherboard is done by traditional means, with spacers and screws. Corsair has pre-installed the spacers, including one with an alignment pin in the center to prevent any issues with placing the board properly. There is plenty of space above and towards the front of the board, with the two large routing holes in the shroud also nicely lining up with the connectors on the motherboard's bottom edge. That said, with a somewhat compact cable channel, things are a bit tight on the front-facing right edge. However we had no tangible issues plugging everything in with a bit of extra attention and effort. Big & bulky modern GPUs should also have no problem fitting into the chassis.


Adding an SSD to the iCUE 5000D RGB Airflow is done by simply taking the frame off the case and screwing the drive down. Once filled, just pop it back into one of numerous possible locations.


You do not actually need any tools for a 3.5" drive as you can snap it into place before sliding it back into the cage underneath the shroud until the two latches on either side of the tray snap down to secure the drive.


To add your PSU, slide it underneath the metal shroud and screw it down through the rear of the chassis, which is pretty straightforward as well. There is plenty of space as long as you shimmy the hard drive cage towards the front of the chassis, so fitting a potent unit to power all your gaming gear shouldn't be a problem.


Adding the 360 mm AIO in the ceiling of the chassis was successful without a hitch. You do need to pre-route your wiring for the top edge of the motherboard beforehand, but connecting the headers is still easily possible even with the liquid cooling unit in place. Unfortunately, putting the radiator above the case frame to gain a bit of extra space is not possible because the cutouts on that frame don't allow for the additional opening for tubing. That said, you should have no issues installing fans on top of your AIO for a push pull configuration.


With everything installed, the Corsair iCUE 5000D RGB Airflow looks essentially the same as the original in terms of cable management. We are still missing some grommets on the bottom opening as that area is a bit messier due to the larger openings, but otherwise the chassis makes a very good & tidy impression. On the backside, we aimed to use as many of the provided Velcro strips, but still ended up using a few zip ties as well. There are a lot of cables with a total of four PCBs all trying to fit. That aspect considered, things don't feel out of control, but not super clean either. By today's standards, the employed plastic cable channels are not the best in terms of bunching up wiring and flexibility in where to apply Velcro strips or zip ties. that becomes apparent toward the bottom of the chassis, which also happens to be the area where there are two large openings in the shroud for cable routing.

Finished Looks

With the system turned on, there is really not much to see. A clean white power LED also lights up right underneath the button to let you know the system is up and running.


Thanks to the AF120 Elite fans and the clear glass panel, you can now clearly see plenty of RGB elements in this chassis. This is a nice improvement over the original's heavily tinted glass.