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Review: Corsair Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition

by Parm Mann on 2 June 2015, 16:35

Tags: Corsair

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qacrue

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Specification and Test Methodology

Corsair Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition Specification

Case Form Factor Mid-Tower
Dimensions 471mm x 200mm x 430mm
Weight 4.8kg
Case Motherboard Support Mini-ITX, MicroATX, ATX
Maximum GPU Length Top Slots: 414mm
Lower Slots: 275mm
Maximum CPU Cooler Height 150mm
Maximum PSU Length 230mm
Case Expansion Slots 7
Case Drive Bays (x2) 5.25in
(x4) Combo 3.5in/2.5in
Case Material Steel
Case Power Supply ATX (not included)
External Connections (x2) USB 3.0
(x1) Headphone Port
(x1) Microphone Port
Fan Mount Locations Front: (x2) 120/140mm
Top: (x2) 120mm
Rear: (x1) 120mm
Warranty Two years

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 latest 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 Ultra 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 100R Silent Edition was recorded as 19.3ºC.