Corsair Obsidian 350D Case Review

Conclusion: Might Be What You Were Waiting For

I have to speak candidly: I haven't been particularly impressed with the last couple of releases from Corsair. Their initial enclosure offerings started out fairly strong; the 800D is a good halo product, the 700D made it more accessible, and the Graphite 600T continues to be an attractive and unique enclosure. There was a very clear chain of progress as Corsair gradually began fleshing out less and less expensive enclosures in their lineup, right up until it seemed like they jumped the shark with the Vengeance C70. The C70 isn't a bad case, but it didn't address what had increasingly been the major failing of Corsair's enclosures: thermal performance. Corsair's cases were never terrible at air cooling, but they were consistently getting co-opted for more forgiving liquid cooling.

After the C70 we had the Carbide 200R, which proved (to me, at least) that you could build a Corsair enclosure too cheaply. I know a lot of people really liked the Obsidian 900D and I can't hold court against it, but it wasn't what I wanted to see from Corsair. It wasn't what I was asking for, and it wasn't really progress for them, just the natural extension of what we already knew they were good at.

I may be heavily biased towards the Obsidian 350D, though. I like small cases, and I really like small cases with big ambitions. The 350D is yet further evidence that Corsair can produce a halfway decent liquid cooling case, but it also demonstrates more of a willingness to innovate than many of the previous enclosures have. A good liquid cooling micro-ATX enclosure is a lot dicier a proposition; you can gamble with a Xigmatek or one of the five million Lian Li models out there, but the 350D feels singularly purpose driven.

There are some really daring decisions inside the 350D if you're willing to look for them. Including not just the mounts but the headroom for a 280mm radiator in a micro-ATX case is gutsy. Deprecating 5.25" drive bays is par for the course for a micro-ATX enclosure, but look at how Corsair deprecated the 3.5" drive bays. The 2.5" and 3.5" cages are removable, but in many ways it seems clear to me that Corsair doesn't intend for that bottom cage to stay there, and the fact that it only holds two drives further cements that notion. Meanwhile the 2.5" cage is an oddly stackable design, where individual trays can be added or removed as needed. It's also toolless, which pays due to the fact that 2.5" drives and especially SSDs are increasingly the direction things are moving in. This year is seeing the release of terabyte SSDs from multiple different vendors, all in that 2.5" form factor.

Ultimately I think the 350D is like a breath of life from a company that seemed like it was slowly becoming conservative and resting on its laurels. Corsair already fleshed out their case line; they're at the stage where they need to innovate (oh I do hate that buzzword) and while you can argue that the 900D fell along those lines, many of their other recent releases did not. But the Obsidian 350D is in many ways a case that I personally wanted. As I mentioned before, micro-ATX cases have an unusual tendency toward some kind of specialization, and Corsair gave us one that had at least some aspirations towards being a strong liquid cooling enclosure, something genuinely rarefied up until this point.

The price is right, the build quality is there, and the ease of assembly is there. Corsair was able to bring the Obsidian aesthetic and increasingly its philosophy down to a new price point, and while stock cooling is only slightly less underwhelming than the 900D's was, everything else lines up pretty well. No one else is going to give you a micro-ATX case with a 280mm radiator mount, let alone one as well built and easy to use as this one is, and Corsair's not gouging you for it, either. I'd say that makes it Bronze Editor's Choice award material.