Breaking Corsair Air 5400 Review (2026)
A doddle to build into and offering excellent thermals, the Air 5400 feels like the follow-up to the legendary Air 540 we've been waiting for.
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I've waited for over a decade for a true successor to the Corsair Carbide Air 540. With plenty of room for storage, fans, and a disk drive in its dual-chamber design, the Air 540 was a great pick for my own PC back in 2014. Though I've since moved on, and that case has been stuck in storage for years. Now, finally—finally—we have a true successor in the Corsair Air 5400.
The Air 5400 isn't just a rerun of old ideas. It's still a stocky cuboid, but where the Air 540 championed a dual-chamber design that has become the norm for PC cases, the Air 5400 offers a triple-chamber design. Think of it like three distinct zones: there's the main one, for showing off your build; the rear one, with plenty of room for cable management; and a third one, for mounting an all-in-one liquid cooler's radiator inside.
The idea behind the third chamber is pretty simple. By mounting the radiator away from other components, and with ample airflow, hot air generated by the CPU can be efficiently expelled from the case and not warm anything around it. It also removes the need for the radiator to block precious fan mounting locations.
It's a slick solution. The radiator is mounted toward the front of the case, behind a removable grill. There's a transparent plastic duct sitting just behind the radiator, which vents out of the case via a large opening from the top to the bottom of the case—the novelty of this has not yet worn on for me and I still frequently stick my hand in it.
Type: CubeDimensions: 467 x 470 x 340Motherboard support: Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, ATX, E-ATX (+ reverse connector)Radiator support: Dedicated chamber (up to 360 mm)Fan support: 3x 120 mm (top), 3x 120 mm (bottom)Front I/O: 1x USB-3.2 Gen2x2, 1x USB 3.2 Gen1, 1x HD AudioMax. GPU length: 360 mmWeight: 16.7 kgColor: Black/whitePrice: w/ LX-R RGB: $310/£285 | w/ RS-R ARGB: $230/£240
Cooler installation is a bit more involved than normal, requiring feeding the liquid cooler pump and cooling through to the main chamber while securing the radiator into place. A removable mounting plate helps a bunch here, as I'm able to mount the fans and radiator to it, then fit the rest to
Source: PC Gamer
