Alright,
Since we are dropping our personal experiences with cases, I'll drop my recent experience here as well.
As some of you may know, I used to rock a mildly modified Corsair 750D with some large radiators shoehorned in. In late January my Threadripper build I'd only had going for a month and a half stopped working, paperweight style. Press button, no power. Pulled out everything that can be pulled out and still post, still nothing when trying to power it on.
Troubleshooting was difficult because I didn't have spares for many of these things, No Spare DDR4, no Spare TRX40 Motherboard, no spare TRX40 CPU. Anyway to make a long story short, a month of troubleshooting and waiting for incorrectly suspected RMA's to return later, I found I had accidentally damaged my Corsair 750D during troubleshooting. I also found to my surprise that the component that had failed was not the PSU, not the RAM, not the Motherboard, but the CPU! (This was a first for me). AMD's RMA process was perfect, but it took some time to get there.
Anyway, so my case was damaged, and I'd been wanting to expand my loop anyway, so I figured it was time to go for an even larger case, and throw some total overkill radiator capacity in there.
I poked around for a while. I knew I wanted something BIG. I was considering the Thermaltake Core case Dan used above. I was also considering trying to find old stock CaseLabs but that proved impossible.
In the end I went with the
Corsair 1000D. It wasn't the RGB or glass that drew me in. It was the fact that it reportedly can fit two 480 radiators in the front and two up top. Since my goal was overkill radiator capacity, this appealed to me. I had originally not considered this case, as I thought of it as too flashy, and too expensive, but as I was researching a discount on an "Amazon Renewed" open box version popped to the top of my searches, and I decided to do it.
Don't get me wrong. I knew I was going with something slightly ludicrous and huge, but no matter how much you read or measure or how many pictures you look at, absolutely nothing prepares you for the sheer size of this thing when it arrives. It is a bit like the opposite of accidentally buying doll house furniture on Amazon.
That last one on the left are my old case (Corsair 750D) next to my new case (Corsair 1000D). Keep in mind that the 750D is a full tower, and not tiny either. That last picture is the best one I have when it comes to communicating the sheer size of the thing.
This is where I should state that this build took me abnormally long to complete. In part because it was a large and complex build, in part because I ran into a surprising number of incompatibilities and further RMA's along the way (some of which are still not resolved) and in part because in a world grinding to a halt because of the virus pandemic, needing to get absolutely anything slows you down to a crawl. Short one fitting? Well, it's a "non-essential item" on Amazon, so maybe you'll get it in 3-4 weeks if you are lucky.
So, this was my most frustrating build I've ever worked on, and I only just got it up and running in my office two nights ago, meaning I was without my desktop for 3 months. If anyone is curious about my build, I documented it
here. The rest of this post will be focused on my take on the case.
This case has many positive features.
1.) The fan/radiator mounts slide out on arms making for easier installation of fans and radiators. The only downside to this is that once you are done with assembly and attach all of your tubing, unless you used really long tubing or QDC fittings, you have to break into and drain the loop if you need to gain access to the fans or radiators again.
2.) Everything about this case is huge. While cable routing can be a little difficult because of the cable length requirement, you'll never run out of space for tucking cables away out of sight for good cable management.
3.) You can fit lots of fans and a lot of radiator.
4.) If you want to, you can even mount two PC's in this case, one EATX and one mini ITX
I'd also be amiss if I did not mention some pretty stupid design flaws.
1.) The marketing material for this case states that out of the box you can fit a 420mm (3x140) radiator up top, and two 480mm (4x 120) in the front. They also claim you can buy a 2 x480mm bracket for the top of the case, making it able to fit 4 480mm radiators. There are a few problems with that. Firstly, in the 3 months I've been doing this, I've never see any accessories what so ever, including the optional top 480mm top radiator bracket in stock anywhere, not even on Corsairs site.
More seriously, they didn't think through the radiator mount locations particularly well. Sure all the holes are there, but if you attach a 420mm radiator up top, and two 480mm radiators in the front, they will interfere with eachother, unless you use very thin radiators. Push pull becomes even more impossible.
The part that makes this a stupid design flaw is that there is extra space. The top bracket could have moved the fan holes backwards a little bit and it would have fit just fine. I take this as a clear sign that whomever designed this never built a water cooling loop into a case. So I did what any self respecting modder would. I made my own mounting bracket. Again, if interested you can check the link to my build log above.
2.) The marketing material USED to claim that you could fit two 140mm exhaust fans in the back. It no longer does, because you can't. (Well, you can, but it involves taking a Dremel to your fans, and drilling extra fan screw holes, which I did.
3.) One of the awesome aspects of my previous case, the 750D was how everything was moddable and stackable. It came with brackets with 3.5" drive bays you could stack up the bottom of the case, or take out if you didn't need or want them to make space for something else. Naturally I assumed the 1000D would do the same. It doesn't. If you want 3.5" drives in your case, it has a 5 bay box in the bottom. This box is riveted to the rest of the case, so unless you want to mod stuff, it is there to stay. (I drilled the rivets out and took it out, because that's where I wanted my pumps)
4.) This is a heavy case. Corsair specs it as 65lb when empty. Add heavy blocks, radiators motherboards, drives, etc. and 3L of coolant, and I swear this thing weighs more than 100LB. Also, it has no handles. There are no good places to get a firm grip anywhere.
Now this is where I mention, I am a large guy. I haven't in a while, but I used to go to the gym and bench my own body weight, and do several long sets of unassisted pull-ups. I'm 6'3" and probably 240lb at this point. I'm not as strong as I once was, but I am also no wimp. Moving it up the narrow stairs from my basement to my office when I was done building almost resulted in disaster. I **** near fell down the stairs with it in my arms. Yes, Corsair lists this as being a two man lift in their documentation, but even with two people, there are no good places to grip it. The glass gets in the way, and I don't want to lift it by glass.
Once I got it up the stairs, I put a blanket on the hardwood floors and just dragged it the rest of the way. When I got to my office and placed it down on the rug under my desk it would not budge. Putting all of my weight behind it, it just wouldn't slide on the rug. There is also less than an inch clearance between the top of the case and the bottom of my desk, so I couldn't just lift it in. The combination of the weight and the very sturdy high quality rubber feet were the problem. In a stroke of genius (if I may claim so myself), I put some old health insurance cards (you know the thick laminated paper kind), one under each foot. That made it slippery enough that I could slowly slide it under my desk.
The weight is obviously not Corsairs fault, but knowing they were designing a case that would be heavy assembled, having somewhere to grip it in order to move it would probably be a good idea.
Two days after bringing the case up, my back is still a little sore. That is on me. Stupid of me to not wait until I could have someone help me move it, but I was just so damned over this build and wanted to finish it once and for all.
Here is a pic of the completed build before moving it upstairs, and a pic of the final location of the case under my desk:
Everything about this case throws off your sense of perspective. So just for reference, that motherboard is a large EATX board.
So, with everything said and done, I wound up with an awesome build, with great cooling capacity.
That said, I'm not convinced I would actually recommend this case to anyone.
