Corsair Obsidian 900D Case Review: Think Big, That's Only HALF as Large
by Dustin Sklavos on April 16, 2013 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- Water Cooling
- ATX
- XL-ATX
Testing Methodology
For testing full ATX cases, we use the following standardized testbed in stock and overclocked configurations to get a feel for how well the case handles heat and noise.
ATX Test Configuration | |
CPU |
Intel Core i7-2700K (95W TDP, tested at stock speed and overclocked to 4.3GHz @ 1.38V) |
Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H |
Graphics Card |
ASUS GeForce GTX 560 Ti DCII TOP (tested at stock speed and overclocked to 1GHz/overvolted to 1.13V) 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 in SLI (full fat testing only) |
Memory | 2x2GB Crucial Ballistix Smart Tracer DDR3-1600 |
Drives |
Kingston SSDNow V+ 100 64GB SSD Samsung 5.25" BD-ROM/DVDRW Drive 3x HGST DeskStar 3TB 7200-RPM HDD |
CPU Cooler | Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo with Cooler Master ThermalFusion 400 |
Power Supply | SilverStone Strider Plus 1000W 80 Plus Silver |
Each case is tested in a stock configuration and an overclocked configuration that generates substantially more heat (and thus may produce more noise). The system is powered on and left idle for fifteen minutes, the thermal and acoustic results recorded, and then stressed by running seven threads in Prime95 (in-place large FFTs) on the CPU and OC Scanner (maximum load) on the GPU. At the end of fiteen minutes, thermal and acoustic results are recorded. This is done for the stock settings and for the overclock, and if the enclosure has a fan controller, these tests are repeated for each setting. Ambient temperature is also measured after the fifteen idle minutes but before the stress test and used to calculate the final reported results.
For the "full fat" testbed, the GTX 560 Ti is swapped out for a pair of GTX 580s, and three hard disks are added to fill out the case.
Thank You!
Before moving on, we'd like to thank the following vendors for providing us with the hardware used in our testbed.
- Thank you to Puget Systems for providing us with the Intel Core i7-2700K.
- Thank you to Gigabyte for providing us with the GA-Z77X-UD4H motherboard.
- Thank you to Crucial for providing us with the Ballistix Smart Tracer memory.
- Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with the Hyper 212 Evo heatsink and fan unit.
- Thank you to Kingston for providing us with the SSDNow V+ 100 SSD.
- Thank you to CyberPower for providing us with the Samsung BD-ROM/DVD+/-RW drive.
- Thank you to HGST for providing us with the trio of hard drives.
- And thank you to SilverStone for providing us with the power supply.
65 Comments
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pensive69 - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
i guess our slow migration BACK to Big Iron has begun.thinking i got rid of these too big to carry systems in
the mid 1980's... crap this is one huge monster.
if it's 40lbs now, think about when you load it up.
....herniaville... i hope i find and install the dolly wheel kit
before that happens.
fyi Dustin; i may have a powered driver bit with an extension i can lend you.
that will lower the skin lost murking back along the rear I/O panel.
this was one most unusual case review.
enjoyed highly!
PSYTRONIX85 - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Hi,I was wondering if you can install 2 PSU's and a 480 rad in the bottom at the same time or is there only room for the 480 rad and one PSU
PSYTRONIX85 - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Thats wilth the rad in push pull config toodezurtblue - Friday, December 27, 2013 - link
So xl-atx will fit? Alot of forums says it is not compatible with xl-atx ( http://www.komplett.no/corsair-obsidian-900d-big-t... ) also corsairs website dont mention any xl-atx motherboard when you see the spesifications.duervo - Tuesday, June 28, 2016 - link
This is one of the very, very few cases that can fit an HTPX motherboard inside. I got one to put my EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard in, because I wanted something with smaller floor footprint than the MountainMods case that I was using. Yeah, it's a 5 year old motherboard at this point, which is old (much like this review to which I'm responding,) but it still runs over 20 VMs on it, with 48GB RAM, dual Westmere Xeons, LSI 9260-8i, 6 HDDs, and 2 SSDs.