How many radiators can you fit in the CORSAIR 6500 Series?

One of the big reasons for going with a custom loop for your system is to have as many radiators as possible to dissipate the heat from your CPU and graphics card. The case you pick has a large say in this, since some cases will only accommodate a single slim 360mm radiator, while others, such as the CORSAIR 1000D, will fit multiple thick 480mm radiators.

The new lineup of CORSAIR 6500 Series cases have been optimized for both air cooling and custom water cooling. In the images above you can see the standard radiator size support if you just want to know what type of AIO you can fit.

But how many radiators can you actually fit inside them if you wanted to go over the top with a custom loop? Let’s find out.

We will start with the 6500X as this version has a glass front panel, and thus loses 3x fan mounts in the front. Despite this, we did a build in just this version of the case and managed to fit two XR7 360, and a single XR5 360. The crazy part is that both of the 60mm thick XR7’s have fans in a push pull configuration!

Please note that in this configuration, we have used a motherboard with reverse motherboard connectors to make it easier to put in the power and front IO cables. Should you want to do this with a normal motherboard it is certainly possible, but you would need to make sure all the bottom connectors are plugged in before you mount the bottom radiator.

Advanced users will also be able to mount a thicker combo in the roof, but this requires that you move the radiator further out towards the side panel, and will make it so that half of the screws holding the radiator to the case will only grip the “lip” of the mounting holes. So while possible, we do recommend users stick with a 30mm radiator in the top.

You should also note that mounting a 60mm radiator in the side in a push/pull configuration will block the four rubber grommets where your 24pin cable would typically go through.

In our build this is not an issue as we use a reverse connector motherboard, but with any standard motherboards you might want to run the 24 pin cable down towards the bottom of the case and through the openings there. Again, this should be done before the bottom radiator gets mounted.

You can of course also mount a single 120mm radiator in the rear if you do not believe the insanity above to be enough.

The 6500D AIRFLOW is almost identical in design to the 6500X. The big difference is the mesh front panel which allows you to also mount a 360mm radiator in this location. It is worth noting that any radiator you mount in the front will likely collide with the bottom, or top radiators if you have anything larger than a 280mm in these locations.

This does not mean that you cannot use the front for anything though – a great configuration would be to use the same radiator setup as we used above in the 6500X, and just add three front fans as intake and have all the radiators exhaust. This way you get fresh air into the case, and exhaust all the warm air from your radiators out.