[section_title title=Introduction]Introduction
- Brand: Fractal Design
- Model: Core 1100
- Price:  £29.99(At time of review)
Fractal Design is a company that specializes in the manufacturing of PC Cases, fans, power supplies and even AIO water CPU coolers. With their headquarters in Sweden, they set out to attain the goal of providing functional and efficient products for their customers. They believe computers are more than just technology and are in-fact a vital part of our lives and as such Fractal Design chooses the products they feel best describe the world around them. Basing their design around Scandinavian style they aim to produce products that offer a sleek, clean and stylish design while remaining elegant.
Today I will be taking a look at one of their PC cases by way of the Core 1100. The Core 1100 is designed for Mini-ITX or Micro-ATX motherboards and offers support for graphics cards up to 350mm in length. It has a brushed aluminium look front panel with one 120mm fan behind this acting as an intake fan to help get air into the case; there is room for a total of three fans inside the case. With its small size and the fact it has a top mounted PSU it will be interesting to see how it holds up against other cases currently on the market in a similar price range.
What Fractal Design has to say about the Core 1100:
Despite its extremely small outer dimensions, the Core 1100 mATX case provides everything you need. The stylish, Scandinavian exterior design is matched by the fully painted interior, complete with the signature white details of Fractal Design. The case is optimized for airflow with a straight cooling path and comes equipped with a pre-installed 120mm fan. The front panel is equipped with dust filters. An innovative vertical hard drive bracket can fit either two 3.5″ drives, three 2.5″ drives or one drive of each size. Both the 3.5″ drive slots come with silicone vibration dampening grommets
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.