facebook rss twitter

Review: Corsair Carbide Series 400C

by Parm Mann on 6 January 2016, 12:45

Tags: Corsair

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qacxhp

Add to My Vault: x

Specification and Test Methodology

Corsair Carbide Series 400C Specification

Form Factor ATX
Dimensions (H x W x D) 464mm x 215mm x 425mm
Drive Bays Internal 2 x 3.5in tool free, 3 x 2.5in tool free
Cooling Front 1x 140mm AF140L fan
Rear 1x 120mm AF120L fan
Top -
Side -
Bottom Supports up to 3x 120mm fans or 2x 140mm fans
Radiator Support Front Up to 280mm/360mm
Rear Up to 120mm
Top Up to 240mm
Side -
Bottom -
Expansion Slots 7
I/O Port 2x USB 3.0
Headphone and mic
Power Supply Standard ATX (not included)
Clearances Heatsink 170mm
  PSU 225mm
  Graphics 370mm
MSRP £79.99

Comparison Chassis

Chassis Form Factor HEXUS Review Reviewed Price Product Page
Antec P380 Full-tower May 2015 £160 Antec.com
be quiet! Silent Base 600 Mid-tower October 2015 £94 Bequiet.com
Cooler Master MasterCase 5 Mid-tower August 2015 £90 Coolermaster.com
Cooler Master Silencio 652S Mid-tower May 2015 £75 Coolermaster.com
Corsair Carbide Series 100R SE Mid-tower June 2015 £50 Corsair.com
Corsair Carbide Series 400C Mid-tower January 2016 £80 Corsair.com
Corsair Carbide Series 600C Mid-tower December 2015 £120 Corsair.com
Fractal Design Define S Mid-tower April 2015 £70 Fractal-design.com
Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Full-tower September 2015 £115 Nanoxia-world.com

HEXUS Chassis Test Bench

Hardware Components HEXUS Review Product Page
Processor Intel Core i5-3570K (quad-core, overclocked up to 4.40GHz) April 2012 Intel.com
CPU Cooler be quiet! Dark Rock 3 - Bequiet.com
Motherboard Asus Sabertooth Z77 - Asus.com
Memory 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws-X (2x4GB) DDR3 @ 1,600MHz - Gskill.com
Graphics Card 2x EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC in SLI (2x 4GB) April 2015 EVGA.com
Power Supply be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 (750W) July 2012 Bequiet.com
Storage Device 120GB SanDisk Extreme SSD March 2012 Sandisk.co.uk
Monitor Philips Brilliance 4K Ultra HD LED (288P6LJEB/00) - Philips.co.uk
Operating system Windows 8.1 (64-bit) October 2012 Microsoft.com

Test Methodology

To get a truer feel of how today's chassis perform, we've revamped our test platform to better illustrate the noise levels and heat build up of a modern-day build. Most chassis become hot and noisy when attempting to cool our previous platform, which consisted of dual Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards, so we've refreshed our GPUs, CPU cooler and PSU to offer a more accurate depiction of the current hardware landscape.

Our Z77 test platform now consists of an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard, an Intel Core i5-3570K processor overclocked to 4.4GHz, a be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU cooler, 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws-X memory and two factory-overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC graphics cards in an SLI configuration.

To find out how well the chassis can cool this particular setup, we log CPU temperature while encoding a large 4K video clip. This task puts full load on all available CPU cores and we extend the stress test by carrying out multiple passes. In order to provide a stabilised reading we then calculate an average temperature across all cores from the last five minutes of encoding.

To get an idea of graphics-card cooling performance, we log GPU temperature while playing Tomb Raider at a 4K resolution with Ultimate quality settings and SLI enabled. Last but not least, we also measure chassis noise by using a PCE-318 noise meter to take readings when idle and while gaming.

All chassis are tested only with the standard manufacturer-supplied fans (any/all of which are set to 'silent' in the Asus BIOS or low-speed using a fan controller if present), and to take into account the fluctuating ambient temperature, our graphs depict both actual and delta temperature - the latter is the actual CPU/GPU temperature minus the ambient. For the record, the ambient temperature while testing Corsair's Carbide Series 400C was recorded as 19.9ºC.