Corsair Graphite 730T Chassis Review

Leo Waldock April 30, 2014 Cases, Highlights-new

Open the hinged main door and you'll see that one of the drive bays contains a box of accessories that consists of various bags of screws and four cable ties.

It's not exactly luxurious but Corsair does provide everything you need for your PC build.

I like the hinged doors and found they made life a great deal easier when I was building the system. You simply pull on the handle to release the latch and swing the door open. This gives good access without the need to remove screws or pull panels, and it is a simple matter to close the door when you have finished working inside the PC.

Swing the door open a reasonable distance, say 45 degrees, and you can lift the door off its hinge pins. It's a bit of a fiddle to replace the door as you have to align the two pins but in the great scheme of things it isn't a big deal.

I had better sound a note of caution as you may well find yourself unable to open either door if your PC is located under a typical desk.

Taking a tour around the inside of the case, there isn't a great deal to dislike. The power supply can be installed with the fan either up or down, there are two 3.5-inch drive towers that each accommodate three drives, and up at the top of the case you'll find three optical drive bays.

To my eye the most obvious features are the enormous cut-out in the motherboard tray and the hefty holes around the edge of the motherboard for cable management.

At the rear of the case you'll see one 140mm fan and at the front there are two 140mm fans. Remember, the 730T doesn't come with any fan controllers.

At the rear of the case there is a fair amount of ventilation. The panel above the fan is heavily perforated, the blanking plates in the expansion slot are punched with holes and there are a couple of knock out tabs for external water cooling.

Right down at the bottom of the case you'll see there is a pull out filter for the power supply fan. Provided, that is, you have the fan mounted facing downwards. Clearly if the fan is on the upper side the filter will be irrelevant.

During my time using the Corsair Graphite 730T I discovered that I had cut my finger. This isn't uncommon with cheaper cases where the steel work is rough and unfinished but I could find no such fault with the Graphite 730T. The culprit, I decided, was the edge of one of the swoopy moulded plastic feet. These feet look very nice however the edges are rough and unfinished, although I may have just been unlucky.

Details of the system and noteworthy features

Take a look at those 3.5-inch drive bays and you'll see that you can either remove one or both towers, or you can stack them one on top of the other.

If I had built the test system using a conventional power supply I would certainly want to remove at least one drive tower to create some space for the cables. As it happens I learned from my self-inflicted problems during the Corsair Obsidian 450D build and this time I employed a modular Akasa Freedom Power 1000W PSU so both drive towers could remain in place. The fact was I didn't much like the appearance of the drive towers so I decided to remove one anyway.

Each drive tower is secured to its base with two fasteners. In Corsair's installation guide these are shown as thumbscrews however the case I received used regular Phillips screws and the heads are obscured by the lip that runs around the open side of the case to support the side panel. Instead I had to tip the case on its back, remove the drive tower and its mounting base in one unit by removing the screws on the underside of the case, and then I was able to detach the drive tower. This is poor design and really rather annoying.

Just for fun I plonked one drive tower on top of the other, which is the sort of thing you might wish to do if you were installing more than three 3.5-inch drives.

My stack of drive towers wobbled around and felt rather flimsy and also blocked the airflow from one of the front fans. My advice here is to rip out one or both drive towers as soon as possible.

That might sound like a silly idea as you are going to need some storage in your new PC but Corsair has thought of that. Open the other side of the PC and you'll find four 2.5-inch drive bays that will serve very nicely for an SSD or two and you could add 1TB or 2TB of laptop hard drive if you wish to keep the PC looking especially tidy.