Building With The Corsair 400R
Corsair’s 400R appears to be a higher-end part than the previously tested 300R, adding more drive bays, more braces, deeper contours on its motherboard tray, and grommets on cable access holes to hide power leads.
Like many of its competitors, Corsair ditches the old AC'97 audio connector (and the messy cable tail that it leaves behind) in favor of an HD Audio interface. Unlike those other vendors, however, Corsair keeps the legacy (but occasionally needed) FireWire connector.
Corsair is one of the few companies to separate its installation kit into several screw packs, which are sorted by type.
The 400R’s 3.5” drive trays add offset mounting holes for 2.5” drives, so that the connectors end up in the same place. Usually, that's a requirement for enclosures with backplanes. The 400R doesn't have a backplane, though. Nevertheless, one of the 3.5” drive pins still manages to get in our way.
The most common installation problem with our wider-than-ATX motherboard is that it covers cable access holes in several competing cases (though the Antec Solo II’s woes were far more severe). Corsair’s 400R is big enough to dodge that problem. However, a raised lip on its motherboard tray blocks half of our SATA ports.
With SATA cables connected to the top row of our motherboard’s ports, the rest of our installation appears super clean.
Corsair’s 400R makes our finished build look simple and professional.
