Corsair iCUE 220T RGB review - Article

Corsair iCUE 220T RGB chassis
iCUE 220T RGB Airflow Tempered Glass Mid-Tower

The new iCUE 220T RGB is a very recent entry into Corsair's very expansive portfolio of ATX mid-tower cases, which - by now - must span over 10-15 models aimed at all price points from the 'budget' (i.e. 50-60 GBP) to the high-end of things, which - to my mind - means around 200 GBP/USD and beyond. The case industry, since 2017 or so, has seen somewhat of a revolution. Closed off front panels are now very much out of favor unless that is what you want, and 'high airflow' orientated designs are in. Given the temperature sensitivity of current CPU/GPU architectures like Turing, Navi, and Zen 2 (admittedly, Coffee Lake-S couldn't seem to care less about heat, as long as it's not running at over 95 degrees!).

The 220T is, seemingly, a continuation of that trend, though naturally we still see that 2016-Present PC builders staple of a tempered glass side panel. The case's front panel features a patterned design, behind which sits a mesh panel designed to keep out the dust solely designed to make your PC run hotter. I have alluded to this airflow revolution in a previous case review, that of the Bitfenix Enso Mesh. The 'non-mesh' version of the Enso was, perhaps, the absolute peak of the anti-airflow backlash from the PC community. We were, ultimately, running our PC's far hotter than they needed to be all for the sake of a 'sleek' look, and that couldn't carry on. Perhaps it's just as well it didn't, either, as modern high-end parts like the Nvidia RTX 2080Ti, Intel Core i9 9900k, and AMD Ryzen 9 3900X are more than capable of pumping out some significant heat when running over spec and overclocked.

Furthermore, the continuing trend of seeing case vendors trying to pin the 'ATX' form factor into smaller and smaller footprints is a very welcome one to see. I say this because, despite the existence of the heat-soaking high-end of things, it has become entirely possible to cram an extremely capable and highly specced PC into a very, very small form factor. Parts like the Ryzen 5 3600 and Nvidia RTX 2060/GTX 1660Ti and Radeon RX 5700 are able to give gamers excellent 1080p and 1440p performance with comparatively little power draw. As such, the popularity of 'smaller builds are better' is one I am very keen to see further experimented with.

The 220T is one of Corsair's 'Smart' chassis, featuring 3x SP120 RGB fans and an inbuilt Corsair iCUE Lighting Node CORE controller hub. This acts as a focal point, allowing you to control your case's lighting from a central point from within the Windows environment. I have, before, seriously bemoaned the modern requirement for having excessive amounts of installed software. However, as I have yet to even use iCUE, I will refrain from passing any pre-judgment until I have used it, which I intend to do later in this review.

We have linked the main product page for the 220T here. You can fairly quickly see that the chassis focuses in on what Corsair believes are the main selling points. Looks, RGB, and airflow. Don't underestimate how big of a selling buzzword the 3rd point is, either, given the very welcome move to more airflow orientated enclosures. The 220T can currently be bought directly from Corsair's UK site for £87.99. This, to me, puts the 220T in an interesting price position. Whilst it is certainly more expensive than someone on a strict(er) budget might want to spend, it's by no means prohibitively pricey. In my view, you should spend no more than 100 GBP/USD/EUR on a case if your total budget is sub 1,000 of whatever currency you're using, or - to put it another way - 1/10th of your allocated funds. To my mind, that puts the 220T in the range of 800 GBP/USD builds and above, maybe 750 if you get some decent deals elsewhere. Feel free to disagree, though. Oddly, Newegg has the 220T listed for a fair way above this, with the black model starting at 109.99 and the white model retailing for well over 200 USD. I would, in all honesty, put this down to a pricing error, or a temporary supply issue. In the next few pages, I will take you through some of the case's technical specifications, a breakdown of it side by side, and then - finally - a quick thought as to how a build proceeded in it.