We review a new chassis from Corsair, the Corsair Carbide 270R. Based on the popular success of the 200 series this compact mid-tower chassis will house your components inside an affordable good looking case. Do you want to go with a lengthy high-end graphics card and liquid cooling? Not even an issue.

Building a high-performance PC these days doesn't require you to have have a massive big tower. I mean sure, taste differs, but the trend ever since last year seems to be "smaller" and well, it's either very expensive, or affordable. This is the reason why Mid-tower factor PCs have become very important. I mean you can build a proper PC with enough space, room, features and design but within that somewhat compact form factor you can also want to house, say, that new Z270 motherboard and Core i7 or perhaps an AMD Zen processor right? Then you'd like to liquid cool that processor and then even add a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or Radeon RX 490 in there (yeah I am looking ahead a little).

Corsair has been pursuing such options and functionality with the Carbide Air 270R. By compartmentalizing chambers inside this small chassis they can house the aforementioned PC components while looking great and with the power supply hidden. A chassis that has a tool-free design, a stylish design, heck, even a see-through panel is present (optional). Then there's room for two 3.5" HDDs and another two 2.5" SSDs. There's no space for 5.25" Optical drives though. The Carbide Series 270R is the PC case that will appeal to a lot of consumers that do not want to spend heaps on a chassis. The 270R with closed panel will cost 59 USD, the version with a side see-through window a tenner more. The unit is optimized for air or water cooling configurations (including room for a 2800mm radiator) without sacrificing space for a full-size graphics card?an impressive feat for a compact PC. Cooling will be a key factor as well and the chassis includes two 120 mm fans - one on rear side and two at the front as intake. The windowed version will get a front LED activated fan (red LED). As mentioned, there's room for liquid cooling as well, and that's despite its smaller size. You can mount two fans with a 120/140 or, say, a 240/280 mm water cooling radiator at the top side of the chassis. Up front you could even mount another 240mm rad.