[section_title title=Closer Look – Interior]Closer Look –Â Interior
The Core 1100 is a very basic and plain case all around. The only real feature of it that sticks out to me is the vertical hard drive mounting bracket which can be seen just under and attached to the 5.25″ bays. Looking at the motherboard tray there is no cut out for CPU cooler installation, no cutouts for cable management – no nothing except room for mounting a motherboard.
Taking a look towards the rear from the inside we get another glimpse of that horrid top mounted PSU slot. I had so much faith over the past couple years I would never have to put up with one of these again, shame on me I suppose! One thing that is nice to see is the removable covers for the PCI expansion slots, the white adds a nice contrast to the case and they are the reusable ones, not the rubbish ones you have to pop out and throw away.
As previously mentioned Fractal Design have included one fan pre-installed and have decided to put it in the front as an intake fan. This is another design feature I personally prefer if you are only going to have one case fan installed, let it be at the front.
As you can see when taking the rear side panel off there really is almost nothing that can be done from this side. Aside from plugging the SATA cables into the hard drives/SSDs – which can be done from the front and putting a screw into an optical drive in the 5.25″ bays there is nothing going on here. When I first saw the top mounted PSU I suspected this would be the case though I still had a bit of hope that I would be pleasantly surprised, needless to say my hope was instantly crushed as soon as the side panels came off.
Please explain the problem with top-mounted PSUs in your review. And please mention some examples of the better cases for less money. Something similar in size would be the Aerocool QS-180 (or 182), but it doesn’t make a great impression and there are hardly any infos on it.
Top mounted PSUs are totally fine for most workloads. A disadvantage is that they are generally getting all the hot air from the case going through them, so if you have a high-power CPU / GPU etc pumping out a lot of heat, that’s going to get sucked through the PSU and prevent it cooling properly. But honestly the “problems” with top mounted PSUs are exaggerated and probably irrelevant for 95% of PC builds. I’ve run top mounted PSU for years on end with no issues.
Similar cases for similar money would include the Cooler Master n200, Cooler Master Silencio 352, Silverstone PS08/PS09, Corsair Carbide 88R and Nanoxia Deep Silence 4.
After considering all my options at this low budget I went for the Core 1100 as reviewed here. But given that this reviewer seems so prejudiced against top-mounted PSUs he would probably be happier with something like the n200.