Corsair Graphite Series 600T: Cool and Quiet
by Dustin Sklavos on November 26, 2010 2:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Corsair
- 600T
Installation and Cable Routing
I love my Antec P182, but working in that case proved to be a very special kind of hell. If you have a graphics card as long as the Radeon HD 5870 or longer, you pretty much have to remove the top drive cage, which means you're stuck using the bottom cage, which orients the drives in the worst way possible. I have small hands and it was still a nightmare to cable up and install drives. God help me when I have to replace a drive.
The 600T, on the other hand, was freakishly easy to get everything set up in. It helps to have a power supply with modular cabling (and if you're considering spending $160 on a case, you may want to go ahead and step that up too) because it allows you to do the installation in steps.
My first step was installing the motherboard. I already had the heatsink (a Xigmatek Dark Knight S1283) mounted to the board, and popping the I/O shield and then motherboard in proved reasonably easy. Corsair provides enough space above the motherboard proper to route cables, but you can also install a liquid cooling system with dual 120mm fans on the radiator if you are so inclined. Suffice it to say, getting the 8-pin auxiliary power cable routed behind the board and plugged in was about as easy as I could ask.
From there, everything else was just as simple. Pop out two drive panels and slide the optical drives in, and they snap and lock into place. Installing the hard drives was also easy, although if you have a 2.5" SSD like I did you'll have to futz around with trying to pop one of the pins out of the drive tray to get it installed. Installing the SSD was probably the most confused I got during the entire operation; Corsair doesn't include very useful instructions with the case and while most of it is self-explanatory, documentation that's a little more thorough wouldn't hurt.
Where I did run into trouble was in routing cables. While they do route to the back of the tray very nicely and easily, that whole region is going to turn into spaghetti in short order. Corsair includes zip ties, but they aren't reusable like the ties in the back of the P182's tray are. As usual the most egregious offender is the main power cable from the power supply. Unfortunately, while the side panels are flexible and designed to bow a little bit to give you some breathing room, this means that they bow out at the bottom corners when cables are cramped in the back. I imagine a cleaner cabling job could probably be done to alleviate this, but nonetheless just a touch more space in the back really wouldn't have hurt this case.
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philosofa - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
I like this case (albeit that I'm a bit of a side-window whore). But honestly.... as a man whose maleness was unaltered at birth... it reminds me of said personal 'maleness'. Seriously... the 600T appears to have a foreskin lol. Assuming this isn't some kind of Freudian thing, why on earth did they design the case in such a way?Ahh well... my search for a reasonably sized case with good cable routing, a side window, top-notch construction and cooling, good GPU clearance and good looks continues.
MeanBruce - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Side window, black powdercoat interior tool-less bays, multiple hdd and ssd configs, two 200mm fans, amazing airflow, room for my Noctua NH-D14, and 180mm Corsair HX-850 psu 4 optical bays for $99. Cooler Master HAF 912 Advanced, available in US from the Cooler Master Store! Nothing like beautiful hardware through a window, Yeah Baby!dirtrat - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Dude, who cares! This isn't a review about your Cool Master case. What an idiotic post!MeanBruce - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
It wasn't an initial post, it was a response to philosofa, who said he was still searching for a case. The HAF Advanced might be what he is looking for. Try reading the above before shouting out dumbass, and if it doesn't concern you move along, what are you twelve?glad2meetu - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
The low cost of the Cooler Master case is offset by your need to add fans to address sound suppression issues. Many other cases also have fan related issues. A Noctura fan is $25+ dollars, which raises the system costs dramatically for a case. Some of the Cooler Master cases are also relatively ugly in appearance in my opinion. For the cost, there are a couple of Lian Li cases on sites such as Newegg which offer a better value, including some aluminum cases. For example, a Lian Li PC-P50WB for $190. Steel cases tend to be rather heavy, so I prefer aluminum if the price is not too high. I thought about this Corsair case, but the large fans in it do not provide enough air flow. I consider it to be one of the main problems with this case. I also have concerns about the Antec cases that generally get good recommendations on Anandtech since they have better airflow than this Corsair 600T case and reasonable sound suppression. My concern with Antec is multiple users have complained about poor ground connections leading to electrical shorts. I currently have a now outdated Antec case in a desktop system that I will be replacing with Sandy Bridge. This time I decided to go with Lian Li.USB 3.0 is still relatively early. I think it is going to be very successful over the next few years with a high adoption rate. Intel screwed up big time with USB 3.0. Luckily other tech companies are filling in the gaps for their screw up. I will probably go with AMD when Intel brings out their high cost light bridge systems in the future. I'm hoping AMD will be able to reduce their power consumption more in the future. I am also interested at looking at their merged CPU and GPU systems.
MeanBruce - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Corsair memory and PSUs are top shelf, but they are far behind in case design at least for air. If you can enjoy the rugged looks of the HAF 912 Advanced Edition there is no better air case on the market now. Air flow is so good I am running the extra large Noctua NH-D14 passively which looks amazing thru the window. I put 2 Noctua uln fans up front replacing the red led 200mm, Noctua 140mm in the psu, another uln for rear exhaust and attenuated the top Cooler Master 200mm black fan down to an 8db level using a blue in-line Noctua resistor. Left all the dust filters in place. Super quiet, super temps, super fast! $99, they said they were only getting 200 in for the US and Canada, I got number 4. And they will be offering a USB 3.0 module in a few months, right now the add on module is Asia-only. Hope this helps!bigboxes - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Fanboi much?abbeytim - Sunday, November 28, 2010 - link
try a nzxt tempest evophilosofa - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Forgot to say cheers for the review Dustin, top notch work :)semo - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
What's with all the USB 2.0 ports? Stopped reading right there. Why would I spend premium price on a case that is already outdated?