Inside the Vengeance C70
When it comes to internal chassis layout, Corsair tends to get a lot of things right. Cable management is usually top-notch, build-quality is good and whether it's an Obsidian, a Graphite or a Carbide Series enclosure, you can usually expect a chassis that's great to work with.
The Vengeance C70 continues in a similar vein, but Corsair has found ways to improve on a winning formula and the end result is a chassis that's a) super-easy to build into and b) ridiculously easy to keep tidy.
Getting the basics out of the way, we have eight expansion slots, a good-sized cutout in the motherboard tray for CPU cooler installation, ample room to route a cable through the top of the tray toward those pesky CPU power connectors, a bottom-situated power-supply area, rubber-grommeted cable-routing holes and two removable hard-disk cages.
Corsair's opted to provide three large cable-routing holes as opposed to numerous small (we personally prefer the latter) but the entire system works well. The chassis feels roomy enough when working with a full-size ATX board (micro-ATX is also supported) and cable management is improved through the addition of three built-in clamps around the back of the motherboard tray. The implementation is so simple we're beginning to wonder why Corsair didn't think of it earlier. Nonetheless, it's a welcome addition and one that makes a good cable-management system even better.
Building into the Vengeance C70 is a breeze, and there are enough fan configurations to ensure that even the most extreme builds receive adequate airflow. Out the box, the chassis is equipped with three fans; two 120mm intakes (positioned, somewhat unusually, behind the drive cage as opposed to up front) and a single 120mm rear exhaust. Building on the default trio, another pair of 120mm fan mounts are positioned in front of the hard-drive cages, two 120/140mm fans can be attached to the side-panel window, the base of the chassis offers two more 120/140mm mounts, and there are another two 120/140mm fan mounts up top.
Providing a more exotic permutation, the Vengeance C70 also has room for two 240mm liquid radiators - one up top and one at the bottom (provided you're willing to forego a hard-drive cage). We're itching to see the chassis done up with a camo paint job, an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard and a liquid-cooled GTX 690, but it looks pretty good with our standard X58 test configuration. A full-size ATX board appears relatively small in the enclosure's large internal cavern, and the cables are easily kept neat behind the motherboard tray.
The Vengeance C70 is ticking a lot of the right boxes, but there are a few concerns thrown into the mix. To begin with, there's hardly any attempt to mask system noise. While we appreciate eleven fan mounts as much as the next enthusiast, we'd liked to have seen Corsair include rubber mounts for the PSU (it sits directly on steel) and a fan controller wouldn't be out of place considering the £115 price tag.
More importantly, the two front 120mm intake fans are unusually positioned. Corsair has kept these fans in front of the hard-disk cages in its previous enclosures, but in the Vengeance C70 the fans have been relocated to the inside. As we're about to find out, this configuration can hamper system cooling performance.