Corsair launches a couple of premium mid-tower cases starting at $200

If you have a couple of Benjamins to drop on a mid-tower case, Corsair will happily take your money and sell you its new Carbide Series 678C ($199.99), one of two new cases it launched today. The other is the Crystal Series 680X RGB, which costs $50 more.

Those are certainly pricey options, though not unprecedented—NZXT's H700i, which is one of the best mid-tower cases out there, costs about the same as the Carbide Series 678C.

Corsair is clearly taking aim at the premium end, and not just in price. The Carbide Series 678C features a brushed metal design with a front panel that swings open for easy access to the dust filter that sits behind it.

The company is billing this as a low noise case, though note the expense of airflow. It ships with three Corsair SP140 PWM fans, a six-fan PWM repeater, and a high-density sound dampening material on the side, front, and roof. For added cooling, users can install up to nine 120mm fans and multiple liquid cooling radiators, including up to two 360mm rads.

On the storage side, the case can fit six 3.5-inch drives, three 2.5-inch drives, and a 5.25-inch optical drive.

The Crystal Series 680X RGB is a different animal. it's a boxier chassis with a dual-chamber design, with the second chamber sitting behind the motherboard tray. That's where the power supply installs, and users can also plop additional fans, cables, and storage drives back there.

It comes with four fans instead of three, and has room for eight 120mm fans and four simultaneous radiators in all. The case also allows for mounting the graphics card vertically to show off behind the hinged tempered glass side panel. And of course RGB lighting figures heavily into the design—the four included fans are RGB lit, and the case comes with Corsair's Lighting Node Pro controller.

To be clear, we haven't spent any hands-on time with these cases, though we hope to get one or both in for evaluation. In the meantime, both are available now in white and black color options, direct from Corsair.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

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