Corsair Obsidian Series 650D Mid Tower Case Review

As most people have come to expect with cases as of late, they all have 120mm and up fans; one thing that most case manufactures stick to is to reuse fans of the same design across their whole line of cases. Corsair, on the other hand, has changed the name of the game and decided to listen to criticism and upgrade the fans that are included with the 650D.Opposed to the fan of the 600T, this fan now has notched blades like we saw on our Zalman SF3 Case Fan; this design is used to keep airflow high while noise is to a minimum. This is A+ work on Corsair’s part.

Corsair has also changed out the rear fan for one of my personal favorites; this is a Corsair branded D12SM-12 from Yate Loon. It is a highly regarded fan among enthusiasts for its ability to undervolt, and its performance on radiators of watercooling loops. I wonder if this was a choice made to compliment their H50, H60, and H70 line of All-in-One Water Coolers?

Finally, our build in the Corsair 650D. Like its brothers in the Obsidian Series, this case is just absolutely fantastic to build in. As it’s easy to see from my build, almost no cables are showing besides where they come out of the PSU and where they connect to the device. Everything is properly routed. Even with a 5 Hard Drive and 1 SSD array in the bottom, you can’t see a single cable connecting those disk drives.Corsair, like with all of their other cases, has really taken the design aesthetics, inside and out, to the top. I could write pages about just how easy it was to maneuver parts, place them in, and connect them together.

The only complaint I can give to Corsair is that they do not have an internal USB 3.0 header on their USB 3.0 cable yet, while plenty of motherboards have begun to ship with them. AMD and Intel solutions are available with this header so there’s no reason for case manufactures not to include an upgrade kit or a revision of their cases to support this standard.

Still, a minor flaw in an almost flawless case design. I have been on a small tangent for years about companies like Lian Li getting the design I love down just right on the outside, but not suiting my needs on the inside. In this case, Corsair has proven they’re listening to the enthusiasts and have presented one of the best cases on the market yet.

Moving on, like I’ve done in the past, we’ll test the included fans of the case to give you a rough idea of airflow and the noise levels of the case.