Corsair Carbide Air 740
Reworking internal perfection
CUBOID CASES are a love/hate phenomenon. For some, the design is distinctive, reminiscent of a particular StarTrek species, a way of having a relatively small footprint for an otherwise cumbersome full tower. For others, they’re big, bulky, and hold too much of a similarity with a leather pouffe, one ready to rest your weary feet on after a long day at work. Either way, it’s hard to argue against the exceptional utility of the design. Separating off the PSU and hard drives from the main chassis helps reduce clutter, keep unsightly components out of view, and creates two separate air chambers, reducing those overall internal temperatures.
Corsair’s Carbide Air 740, then, is a much needed upgrade on the somewhat aging Air 540. Far more rambunctious than its predecessor, the 740 has taken the best of the 540’s stylization and incorporated it into a more modern-day solution. Gone are the dual 5.25-inch front drive bays, the floor-mounted 3.5-inch hard drive mounts, and the simple, refined design of its ancient ancestor, and in their place is a sleeker, tuned chassis, designed around the digital age. The overall cleaner internal layout allows for far superior cooling options, yet with still enough hard drive space to keep even the most enthusiastic RAID 5 supporter happy.
OF TWO MINDS This chassis seems to suggest a meeting of minds—a mixture of Corsair’s prestigiously professional Obsidian series, and the audacious glamor of the Graphite lineup. But does it pull it off? Hell, yes. The Carbide Air 740 looks simply stunning— more so in person than any photography could ever reveal. The meticulous matte finish keeps it looking sleek, while the dust-filtered front and top air intakes still house all the utility necessary to ensure a sound, cool interior.
Speaking of cooling, you’re spoilt for choice. In the main compartment, you can fit a 360mm radiator in the front, a 280mm rad in the roof and in the floor, and a 140mm rad in the rear—or, of course, their corresponding fan sizes. The secondary chamber is a little less forgiving, with the potential to mount two 80mm fans in the rear, and, naturally, there’s a sufficient filtered intake grate for your power supply to suck air through as well. But it’s the main compartment that’s most intriguing: Thanks to that compartmentalized design, and the shifting of the PSU into the secondary section, it actually gives you the option to run a more thermally attuned cooling orientation. For instance, if you have two 140mm fans in the floor drawing air in, three 120mm fans in the front as intakes, one 140mm in the rear, then two 140mm ones exhausting out of the roof, you produce a cleaner, more efficient airflow model, one that should help improve internal temperatures, and keep SLI or CrossFire systems supplied with a steady flow of cool N , O , and CO . 2 2 2
All in all, the Carbide Air 740 meets a huge list of needs and uses, and its flaws are few and far between. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t any. The biggest ones we found revolved around the 2.5inch bays located in the rear compartment. Supporting up to four separate drives, you can easily remove the unused drive bays that you don’t want via the toolless mechanism—at least, in theory. The fact that we had to hoist out the instruction manual for this task baffled us a little, but even doing that failed to reveal any insight as to what we needed to do to remove the additional cages, resulting in us snapping two of the retaining pins off one of the cages. Bad design? We think so, but it’s certainly not enough to detract from the phenomenal positives of this chassis, and that’s why it’s well worthy of a solid score of nine. –ZAK STOREY