Assembly

As mentioned before, you may take out the entire tray, but I really do not see any reason to do so. Installing the board is more than easy with so much space at your disposal. The full size ATX board is dwarfed in the Obsidian 800D and the cable management holes line up perfectly along the edge of the board.


Installing a hard drive into the bottom two slots requires the removal of the front panel. This is done by a firm pull away from the case frame. Simply place the rails on the drive - in this case the SATA backplate incompatible version of the VelociRaptor - and slide the drive into the bay until it snaps into place.


All other drives were placed into the trays and secured with the included screws - so yes, you still require a screw driver, but there is nothing wrong with that for this purpose. Once installed in such a tray, slide it into place and push down the locking lever. While an excellent and highly favorable feature, the tray and locking system used is no big innovation. Nonetheless, it has been implemented flawlessly in the Obsidian 800D


In theory, you will not require any screws to install an optical drive, but I highly recommend using at least a single screw on each drive, as the plastic locks do not hold them all that good. I do applaud Corsair for the effort, but I still do believe that any trusted and true method should be valued more than a semi-functional innovation.


Once everything is installed, I have hooked up everything. All the data cables, power lines and case i/o. The only thing I was not able to route through were the PCIe power cables, as those were too short. Corsair does include an extension cable for the P4 power cables however. Overall, this is the cleanest system I have ever built (and I have built many), right out of the box without having to mod anything. There is simply no need to and Corsair has included openings wherever necessary. As you can see, all the cables are hidden behind the mainboard tray and the opening under the CPU area is so large, that you can clearly see all six memory slots of the X58 board.

Finished Looks

Even though there are a lot of cables below the mainboard tray, the side panel closes easily. You can clearly see the mainboard and the PSU through the side window, while the unexciting optical drives are hidden.


Turning the case on, it does appear to be a bit louder than some others out there. This is not so much due to the fans used, which are very quiet, but due to the fact that all the noise can easily exit the case through the open vents in the ceiling of the case. Corsair has not included any lighting, but the LEDs on the mainboard do help out with that aspect. I am happy to report, that there are absolutely no vibrations being passed on to the case frame, even after using it for a few weeks now.