Corsair Obsidian Series 800D ATX Chassis Review

Installing The Hardware

The prototype Corsair Obsidian 800D chassis didn’t come with any instructions, but it did include a box full of goodies that would be needed for installing a system.

The Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard fit just fine and we actually removed one of the motherboard standoffs that was factory installed since it wasn’t needed and we didn’t want it to touch the back of the board and possibly cause a short. The AMA Aragon 900 water cooling kit’s dual 120mm radiator also fit nicely at the top of the Obsidian Series 800D case.

The GIGABYTE GA-EX58-EXTREME Intel Core i7 motherboard’s CPU socket is just under the prototype’s cut out area as you can see above, which is a shame. We had to remove the board and put the back plate in for our water cooler block since it couldn’t fit behind the board with this cutout. Corsair has re-tooled this case to have a larger opening and that is one of the reasons that the case’s launch has been delayed by several months.

Corsair sent us this image of the new and larger cutout that will be on all of the retail versions. The new backplate cutout should fit all of the known Intel Core i5 and Core i7 motherboards on the market today. It still has a plastic cover like our prototype, but it is not shown in the image that Corsair provided to us.

Here is a picture of the AMA Aragon 900 Water Cooling Kit and the Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard successfully installed inside the Corsair Obsidian 800D chassis. After a quick leak test was completed we felt that it was leak free and ready for the rest of the hardware to be installed.

After the leak test was completed and one minor leak was taken care of the rest of the hardware was installed into the chassis. In went 12GB of Kingston HyperX 1600MHz CL9 memory with the HyperX Fan, more than plenty if you ask us. It also goes well with the black and blue case theme that we were going for. Three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 video cards running in SLI will surely handle any game we want to play and the Intel Core i7 965 Extreme processor has the horse power needed to push all those shader cores. The end result is rather impressive if you ask us. Cable routing was a breeze and not a single sharp edge was found inside the Obsidian 800D.

Here is a shot of our custom gaming system with the case door installed so you can get a feel for what people will see when gawking at your rig.

Here is a shot of the front and the side again to give you another perspective. Notice that we flipped around the door on the hot-swap SATA drives. Just for fun we tossed the fully assembled system shown above on the scale and it topped the charts at over 56 pounds! The Corsair Obsidian 800D will make cheap desks cry for mercy.