The Obsidian 350D with three Hydro Series coolers

Recently a colleague of mine here at Corsair told me about some work that he was doing on his Obsidian 350D, and I thought it was pretty amazing and had to share. Dennis Lee is a Component Product Engineer here at Corsair who works on maintaining the quality of Corsair products and also happens to also be a PC enthusiast. Dennis picked up an Obsidian Series 350D soon after they became available and managed to fit THREE Hydro Series coolers inside of it! When he first told me about it, I had a hard time believing that it was possible so he brought it in and we took some pictures. As you can see in the pictures below, everything fits without a problem!

Here is a list of hardware from his system:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3820

CPU Cooler: Hydro Series H100i

Mobo: Asus Rampage IV Gene

Memory: 32GB Vengeance 1600MHz

GPU: 2x Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti in SLI

GPU Cooler: 2x Hydro Series H55 with custom bracket

PSU: AX860i

Case: Obsidian 350D

Fans: 2x Corsair AF120 White LED, 1x Corsair AF120 Performance, 4x Corsair SP120 Performance

Dennis used an H100i mounted to the top of the case to cool the CPU, and a pair of H55 coolers mounted to the front of the case to cool the two GTX 560Ti GPUs. Of course the H55 will not mount to a GPU by default, so some custom brackets were used. Dennis got his brackets from http://keplerdynamics.com/sigmacool/ .

In order to fit the two H55 coolers in the front, some of the SSD cage slots had to be removed, but the end result is a very clean installation.

You can see that even in this configuration where you have no spaces between your GPUs, you just barely have enough space for an H55 cooling block.

I asked Dennis what his system was like before the 350D and the Hydro Series coolers and this is what he told me:

“I first started trying to build in an HTPC case but SLI on mATX with the ASUS DCII coolers turned out impossible.  The top card was actually overheating and shutting down (90+ C) while the bottom card was around 60 C.  I switched to the 350D because there are 5 expansion slots instead of the typical 4 for mATX cases.  This solved the SLI temperature problem by spacing out the cards but I was running the cards at x16, x8 instead of x16, x16 (which was the whole point of going X79).  With an H100i cooling the CPU, why not use similar for the GPUs? After using the H55s for the GPUs, both cards stay around 45 C.”

Definitely a drastic drop in GPU temperatures, and likely overall case temps as well! In case you are wondering if he has overclocked anything, I asked him that as well:

“I have only slight overclocks.  The CPU is OC’ed from 3.6 GHz to 3.9 GHz.  Both GPUs are OC’ed from 900 MHz to 923 MHz (GPU Core), GPU Memory from 4200 MHz to 4500 MHz.”

 I also noticed that he had some nice aftermarket filters which cover all the openings on his 350D.

The 350D has been one of my favorite mATX chassis since I first laid eyes on an internal engineering sample, and Dennis' 350D is definitely the "coolest" one that I've seen. One of the reasons I like it, is he fact that you can build a very high end system in an mATX form factor without having to limit yourself to which hardware you can use, full size PSUs, GPUs, and Hydro Series coolers are all options. With this Dennis' 350D, he has showed me that the 350D is even more flexible that I thought!

I will leave you with a few more glamour shots of the back side, and cable routing which is incredibly neat and tidy!