Corsair Carbide 500R review - Product Showcase

Here we have the right side panel (behind the back of the motherboards. Look at the indentation, there's room there for cable management. No mesh or ventilation is to be found here though.

Internals then, since the photos are dark, bare with me. First impression, that's just a lot of room to work in for a mid sized tower alright. The second thought would be the all black design, including cables and connectors. Even the grommet holes have black rubber inlays to hide cabling, yes, cable management is an important feature of the chassis. You can make it all really clean and tidy.

We can also see the gaps in the motherboard tray with the rubber inlays here a tad better (grommet holes), here you can route your cabling through, and the rubber inlays keep things clean and tidy looking.

The mainboard tray whole seems a little bigger than the 400R, not 100% sure though. A substantial change is the ability to remove the 3.5" storage bays. Say that you have an exceptionally long graphics card then you could remove the top bay and still fir the card in there. Though any lengthy 31CM card will fit fine though.

To the right you can see that you'll get 8 PCI slots to play around with so in theory you can house up-to three graphics cards in here, four if you are lucky. There’s room for eight PCI-E cards of up to 316mm in length and thus 452mm is you remove a storage cage.

You secure the graphics cards or other cards with a thumbscrew. Above it, four round holes with rubber inlays. These could be used for LCS tubing, but are intended to route the front panel USB 3.0 connector cables towards the rear IO (where USB 3.0 connectors could be located).

At the top side we can see one 120mm fan, is id included and installed for you already. In the upper mesh you'll notice that mounting holes for other fan and radiator solutions have already been prepped.

A good and popular trend these days is to make a big gaping hole in the motherboard tray. This actually is a CPU backplate cutout which allows you to remove and install a new CPU cooler much easier.

Typically you'd need to take out the motherboard to install a new cooler, now you can access it from both sides without that unpleasant experience of removing a motherboard from the chassis.

And there sure is always a lot of wiring to manage alright. These are all cables for the front-panel connectors, USB 3.0, FireWire and audio. Simple detail -- all black cabling ... we like that.