Corsair Carbide Air 540 Case Review

Noise and Thermal Testing

It's reasonable to expect the Corsair Carbide Air 540 to provide excellent thermal results, and you'll see it definitely delivers. Where we do make a sacrifice is in acoustics; Corsair is using three very powerful 140mm fans, and while they're not especially noisy, they're not silent either.

What I think Corsair does have a lot of with the Air 540 is play. Similar to the much larger Obsidian 900D, the Air 540 really seems like a case that demands some experimentation. I couldn't resist experimenting with the case a bit and tried to see if I could match stock performance with a stack of silent aftermarket fans. With three 120mm be quiet! fans in the front as intakes and three 140mm ones in the top and back as exhausts, all running at 7V, I was able to get idle noise down to sub-30dB and load temperatures only increased about 3C. This is anecdotal and by no means conclusive, but something to keep in mind.

Stock thermal performance is pretty excellent, with only the powerful Rosewill Armor EVO really competing. But the Armor EVO has build quality issues that the Air 540 doesn't share.

The Air 540 is also, unsurprisingly, louder than most of the competition. Our stock testing configuration is actually the worst scenario for the Air 540; this is swatting a fly with a Buick. The stock cooling of the 540 wasn't designed to handle this light a workload.

Switch to our overclocked system configuration and the Corsair Carbide Air 540 continues to be extremely competitive and near the top of all of the charts.

Now that we're dealing with an overclocked system, suddenly the Air 540's noise levels aren't as bad as they used to be. Idle noise is still unpleasant, but at least the character of it continues to be a low, hollow whoosh that's far less irritating than the sound of several smaller fans.

Before getting into full fat testing, it's important to point out that while other cases are tested with three 3.5" drives, the Air 540 only technically supports two. While I could theoretically have installed a third in the second 5.25" drive bay, I didn't feel like it would have any relevant impact on the case's overall performance. The 3.5" drives sit at the bottom of the primary chamber and receive modest airflow, but they don't impede airflow in any way the way they would in a traditional ATX enclosure.

While you could argue the Air 540 isn't operating on a completely level playing field, I don't personally think adding the third drive into the second 5.25" bay would have any tangible impact on the case's performance.

The drives aren't running especially cool, but they're nowhere close to hitting spec either. In exchange, you get absolutely stellar cooling performance in the primary chamber on all of your major heat-generating components.

The NZXT H630 is able to provide better noise suppression, but it sacrifices thermal performance to get there. Our full fat testbed is an absolute beating, though, and so far the only case I've seen get halfway decent noise levels under load has been the SilverStone Raven RV-04.