Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today we're taking a look at a brand new case from fractal design this is their define mini C and if you're watching this video on the day of upload it has just launched today and it's a micro ATX case which is kind of exciting because it's been a while since fractal released a chassis in this form factor I think the last one we saw was the define mini which actually looked a lot like this one in fact this case looks very similar to all the other recent fractal cases we've seen like the defined s to define nano s kind of has that same Scandinavian minimalistic design however once we take a look at the internal layout we'll see that there have been some drastic improvements made that the other cases do not currently have so that's going to be pretty exciting as well so taking a look Oh first off I should mention MSRP $80 on this bad boy 80 bucks not too shabby very competitively priced that's for the windowed version it does come in a non windowed version as well for five dollars less so you could save some money there if you don't care about seeing your innards and showing off your handiwork now with that said take a look at the front of the case here you do get that same faux brushed aluminum finish that we're used to seeing on these fractal cases however it is a plastic construction on the front panel and even though it does have this very nice closed off look you still get ample ventilation on both sides of the chassis so you do get fresh intake going to the rest of your components inside which is also nice to see now if you pop off the front panel you do get a removable dust filter along with some mounting options which I will get to in a bit moving on to the top you've got your front panel IO which includes mic and headphone jacks power and reset along with two USB 3.0 ports just behind that you get a single module bed cover we've seen these before from fractal it's got some sound dampening material on the underbelly if you want to tailor your system for for silence for example however you can remove it there's some internal latches that allow you to pop the panel out very easily and that'll actually open up the case for more airflow if you wanted to slap a couple 120 millimeter fans on there you can slap up to two of them or if you wanted to install a 280 mm I'm sorry 240 millimeter radiator you can do so however you want to make sure that your RAM is no taller than 40 millimeters that's from the motherboard to the top of your memory module otherwise you could run into some interference issues with that radiator at the rear of the case you will find one of fractals new dynamic x2 GP 12 120 millimeter fans with these white blades I would assume there's also been some kind of improving the bearings or airflow and things like that this is one of two included fans you'll find in the define mini sea there's also one at the front intake of the chassis but this one on the back is actually positioned on these flexible mounting strips which allow you to move the fan up or down preferably down if you want to open up some clearance for a top radiator potentially now just beneath the exhaust fan you'll find five expansion slots and this is kind of the beautiful thing about the micro ATX form factor is that you kind of hit this sweet spot between a mini ITX build which is super compact and portable but not very feature filled you can't do a dual GPU setup for example and a full Tower ATX chassis where you have all the features you can do you know four-way SLI four-way crossfire if you wanted to however you're dealing with a lot more real estate that you're taking up on your space so for users who don't really have all that space in their rooms on their desks but still want to run maybe a multi GPU setup or even just a couple different PCIe cards in their motherboard this might be a good option is going with a micro ATX case like this so five expansion slots gives you plenty of functionality without sacrificing too much in in real estate now towards the bottom of the case you get this power supply bracket which you can remove with these two captive thumb screws speaking of which both of the side panels also include captive thumb screws so that's very much appreciated but to install the power supply you simply remove that bracket screw it on to whatever unit you're going to install and simply slide it back into the rear of the chassis before remounting those thumb screws super simple you also get a power supply dust filter which spans the entire length of the chassis because there is an optional 120 millimeter fan mount at the front floor of the case as well so you're going to want ample coverage for a dust filter to cover both that optional fan mount as well as your power supply assuming that you're installing the unit with the fan face downward on top of that the the filter is accessible from the front of the case simply because it's just kind of a pain sometimes when you want to clean that out to have to reach around to the back your chassis much more convenient to have it at the front in my opinion taking a quick look at the bottom here you get four of these shiny plastic feet with the rubber pads at the very bottom as to not scuff up the surface of your desk and to also keep your system from slipping and sliding around as far as the side panels go I already mentioned the captive thumb screws which is very much appreciated you'll get a fairly large side panel window here on the main side of your system which is kind of a plasticy acrylic plexi material whatever you want to call it it's not tempered glass it's the typical plexi that we're used to so it is fairly prone to fingerprints and especially scratches so I would make sure to leave on that plastic wrap that plastic packaging until you're completely done with your system just to avoid any kind of accidental scratches essentially do the opposite of what I just did here there is no sound dampening material on this side panel simply because the window itself takes up most of the real estate on the panel it would be kind of pointless to even include just a little sliver of dampening material anywhere here however on the other side panel that's pretty much all you get is just sound dampening material across the entire thing to again reduce noise and vibration and optimize the chassis for silent operation so I think on that note that pretty much covers all the external features of the chassis why don't we go ahead work our way inwards now I'm going to take the side panels off and we're going to start installing all of this Hardware I'm going to go I'm not going to say what all this stuff is until I'm actually ready to install it we'll just call it out as we go and we'll take it from there should be good let's do it neck all right so we've got the main side panel off now and it's time to install the motherboard I've already prepped the motherboard installed the CPU memory and cooler and all that jazz so we're just going to go ahead and start installing these standoffs they are not pre-installed however fractal does give you one one bonus when bonus stand up in the middle to kind of get yourself oriented which is thoughtful what I'd like to see pre-installed standoffs just to cut down some of the installation time but what can you do you guys can probably see the generous CPU cooler cut out here which is very nice as well as plenty of grommeted holes for for routing your cables through you got two up here preferably for your 8 pin EPS for your CPU may be like radiator fans things like that and two very large cutouts on the side here for your 24 pin ATX USB three whatnot there's also a couple other cutouts at the bottom of the chassis which we'll take a look at in just a moment and drop in our motherboard like so and you guys are probably wondering what trick and motherboard is this we're actually using an older platform for today's test build the cuz turns out the only micro ATX board I had on hand that was available was a Z Z 170 or Z 77 board so you can see we're a couple generations old here rocking that Ivy Bridge lifestyle we've got a 35 70 K Core i5 in here which I actually take from my htpc I'm not sure if you guys caught that from my Instagram post but wifey sauce was not too happy when she found out that the htpc was not in order additionally we've got 8 gigs of some a data memory that's just some budget economical kit that I've had for a while along with a very new NZXT cooler this is the kraken x 50 to 240 millimeter but it would be a nice way to test out the radiator support in the define mini s here are the started to define mini c and wha-la while we're at it why don't we go ahead and pop out the mod you vent cover while we're here just to open up a little bit more airflow and I just wanted to point out that the radiator support at the top as well as at the front of the case does feature the same kind of flexible mounting strips that we saw on the rear exhaust fan so if you wanted to kind of slip and slide the radiator whichever way you wanted to gives you a little bit of flexibility there speaking of which we are going to finish installing this ki yo I'm going to go ahead and position the radiator at the front of the case I think it'll look pretty nice right there now really quick we're going to pause for a second on the radiator installation here to show you one of the newest additions to the defined family of chancy's which is a power supply shroud many of you guys are familiar with these you've seen them on plenty of chassé ease in the past and I think we've been waiting for fractal to implement one of these for a long time now so it's nice to see that they finally have if you're unfamiliar with power supply shrouds it's basically a compartment it compartmentalizes your chassis into a separate unit for your power supply itself as well as to stash any excess unwanted cabling and keep them out of sight for a cleaner more tidy look overall in your system additionally there's a hard drive cage underneath here which we're going to get to in a bit another thing I wanted to point out is if there's a lot of ventilation at the top portion here of the shroud and that's just to allow for some more airflow either for your power supply if you were to mount it with the fan facing upwards or for a second graphics card if you were to if you were doing two-way SLI or crossfire your bottom card might be start for airflow if there wasn't any kind of ventilation on this shroud here so that's a that's going to ensure some cooler temperatures hopefully maybe we'll do some testing on that in the future now circling back to our radiator installation here since we're dealing with the 240 millimeter unit we are pretty much good to go we can just slap our fans in there we can even probably have some room for push-pull in this configuration which is really nice to see however if we were to try installing a 280 millimeter radiator you would have to make some adjustments to the case to get that to fit at the front here including removing this front panel there's a panel that's embedded into the power supply shroud which you would have to remove in order to open up some more clearance for that 280 millimeter radiator and also the hard drive cage at the bottom underneath the shroud would have to be positioned further back towards the back of the case closer to the power supply which can be done in this chassis so you would have to do that I'll show you guys how to do that in just a bit but a couple modifications there if you were to fit a radiator at the front of your case that is of the 280 millimeter right and radiator installation complete alright our supply installation remove the bracket two thumb screws very simple and we're going to screw this on to the power supply like so I already tried you cannot install the power supply from the backside of the case it has to be through the rear and nothing else it just simply doesn't have the clearance which is fine I would have liked to see the option for both but at least there's still a viable solution that's pretty easy so why don't we go ahead and get this guy installed alright alright the screws various screws then you shove all the cables in there and yes pusher in that's an easy there we go just screw it down there you have it alright so now that we're ready to connect our front panel connectors to our motherboard which includes things like HD audio our power reset and things like that you can see that there's actually a couple cutouts there's three cutouts there's one at the very rear want the towards the middle where where your USB 2.0 would presumably be on your motherboard and one at the front here so you get three cutouts they aren't grommeted they're actually too small to even be grommeted but they are there so that you can easily route your front panel connectors to your motherboard very tightly and neatly neatly and discreet be beautiful just get off now taking a look at the backside of the case here we can kind of see what's going on underneath our power supply shroud so of course we already have the unit installed as well as our hard drive cage now the hard drive cage can support up to two and a half inch or two three and a half inch drives if you're going to be supporting the lighter it does the trays come with these rubber vibration vibration pads for optimal silence and they are made of metal so they're very sturdy I'm going to go ahead and slop this in right there right there and if the hard drive cage looks a bit a bit loose to you right now it's because it is there are four screws that are holding in place at the bottom of the case that I have already loosened to show you just how flexible this cage can be so this is the default position that it comes in but if you wanted to you could slide it all the way over and pretty much hug the power supply unit as close as you would want to before interfering with the the actual cable plugins and that's again to open up room at the front of your case for a lengthier 280 millimeter radiator and you could do push-pull with a with with the radiator that size as well you would just have to perhaps use the fans install the fans outside of your case not necessarily outside but outside of the mainframe underneath your front panel the plastic front panel there so you'd have one set of fans there and another set of fans your and then you could fit another set of fans just before the hard drive cage there now of course if you wanted to you could remove this hard drive cage entirely and have even more room for any kind of radiator business at the front there and you would still have additional room at the bottom at the very very floor of the chassis there is a mounting point for a three and a half inch drive and that does come with rubber vibration pads as well so you're not just installing it straight to the floor of the metal chassis you actually do get some some buffer there for or reduced noise and vibration which is really cool since our radiator is already installed there's no other alterations of this case we need to do in order to install our hard drive so we're going to go ahead and do that now boom he has a really quick look at the drive cage from the bottom of the case again you can see that it can slide pretty far off to the right to open up clearance for that 280mm eater radiator and you can kind of see the little cutouts here for the rubber vibration pads if you were to install a single three-and-a-half inch drives at the floor of the case and remove the cage altogether there we go now also at the back of the case right behind the motherboard itself actually overlapping the the generous CPU cooler cutout you'll find your dedicated SSD mount where you can fit one two three three SSDs I believe that's pretty generous actually it's got the single thumb screw that holds it in place you can remove it like so let's go ahead and mount some SSDs to this bad boy we're just going to mount one actually in the middle and see how that goes does come included with screws for you to do that simply just align it and screw it down and boom now one thing to keep in mind with this kind of SSD layout here is that you're going to need a flat SATA cable to connect it at least on this end properly right angle say the cable in this configuration will not work you can probably get away with that with the hard drive cage down there but not for this kind of more flatter orientation installing the graphics card in the define mini C is quite straightforward pretty much like most cases that you've probably seen simply remove the PCI slots which do have thumb screws go ahead and slap the card in for our test build we'll be using an unnecessary GT X 1080 founders Edition because we can replace thumb screws now I should mention here that you get three hundred and fifteen millimeters of GPU clearance length if you are going to be installing a fan at the front of your case if there's no fan at the front then you get three hundred and thirty five millimeters of GPU light length which is probably more than any of us should ever need as far as the i/o goes if you aren't using an arrow and you're going to be using just a standard CPU cooler Tower then you get a hundred and sixty eight millimeters of height clearance with the windowed version of the defined mini C and 170 millimeters of clearance with the non windowed version alright winding down - pretty much the end of the road here last thing we got to do is tidy up these cables and talk about cable management in this particular case and so far just from looking at it before I really even get started with everything exploded all over the place I think this is going to be pretty straightforward and also pretty hassle-free because we've got a lot of mounting options here or routing options I should say there's plenty of tie down points you get a four of them right here below the SSD actually there's three more right here just but just a right next to the power supply shroud and you've also got this kind of like recessed area to the left of the motherboard which you can really tuck in a lot of cables especially with the help of all these handy velcro straps frightful design has included three of them for you those work really well from my past experience you've also got plenty of room underneath the power supply shroud itself between the hard drive cage and the unit especially if you were to remove the hard drive cage entirely then you would have even more room to just stash extensions I don't know if you wanted to actually integrate like a water cooling pump down there you probably could find some way to MacGyver that there's tons of routing options here so why don't we go ahead and start tidying this up and see how we do and voila there it is cable management's all wrapped up in about five to ten minutes of tidying let's see how easily the side panel goes on this is the wrong side panel this is for the Nano s good lord where are you Kyle come back to us here we are so pop that on like so and holy smokes there's like zero push back there's literally it might as well be empty back there there was zero push back completely screwed down no problem sweet and I've also connected the extensions on the other side as well so that means we're pretty much complete let's go ahead and pop the the rest of our stuff back on here including the dust filter still in focus front panel tada there she is ladies and gentlemen all built from the ground up very straightforward although there was one thing that I forgot to mention earlier in the video and that is if you are going to be removing that top mod you vent cover fractal design has also included this nifty magnetic dust filter figure this lamp right there at the top like so that way you get all nice and clean doesn't get all overrun with dust it's it's a match made in heaven let me tell you so yeah when we go ahead and cut back to a wide shot so you can see my beautiful face I'll wrap things up with some closing words and we'll end this here video all right so as far as my closing statements on the define mini Sego honestly there's not too much to complain about here it could be nitpicky and say while I wish they'd pre-installed the standoffs to make the build process go a little bit quicker but again it's an $80 case and for that price point it's pretty much unparalleled the term in terms of like how much hardware you can fit in this thing how much water cooling support there is in terms of radiators you won't really find that in a micro ATX case at this price range especially because the size I don't know if I did a side-by-side comparison maybe I'll jump to a b-roll shot right here but this case the define mini seat isn't that much larger than the defined Nano s it's actually much closer to that size of that Mini ITX case than it is to something like the definer v or the defined s which makes it even more compelling if you're short on space desk space room space at your place of usage so that's that's also pretty pre pretty cool now one thing to consider here if you are going to be installing two graphics cards if you're doing a dual GPU setup is that your bottom card might be a little bit starved for airflow especially since the power supply shroud here is where it is now I did mention that there was some ventilation that could help with that however after installing a standard ATX power supply I've noticed that it's actually pretty much up to the brim of that ventilation rendering it more or less useless to any kind of video card that would be directly above it so if you were going to do SLI or crossfire for example in this case I would suggest maybe opting for an sfx power supply unit something a little bit smaller to actually open up that ventilation a bit more and then making sure you have ample airflow going to that part of your chassis by having you know either a fan at the bottom there or making sure that your radiator your front radiator reaches all the way to the bottom giving some fresh intake to your graphics card there but apart from that fractal design has done it again with a small but powerful little chassis here and I give them full marks for water cooling support on a budget especially in this form factor so that's all for now guys let me know what you think of this chassis here before you go be sure to toss me a like on the video if you enjoyed it and be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already as always I'm Kat a little bit whit until I change my channel name again thank you all for watching have a great day and I will see you all in the next video