Gadgetory

welcome to my long-overdue on boxing the fractal design core 1000 sorry about that I forgot my knife core 1000 micro ATX computer case now they call it a computer case but because I guess it's hard to call a micro ATX case like I gain in case or anything like that and honestly this case is very very popular with our b2b sales guys at NCIX where I work so um maybe I'm just being completely irrelevant when I bring up gaming at all but fractal is more known for their enthusiasts class of cases so I'm pretty excited to have a look at their core series because the core series is as the name implies more of a oh okay the documentation is their user's manual more of a bare-bones style case sounds quite small which is one of the reasons it's gotten chosen for some of the for some of the designs some of the system builds that we've done because it's very very compact and fits you know fits in well in like an office environment something like that just because of its size I know we had one guy hmm I needed like 20 of them because that was this was the only case that he could find that fit the dimensions of the cabinets that it has that bad to fit into other than getting like a Dell or something and that's what he did last time and based on his experience with the last time he decided he wanted something from NCIX not something from now so there you go alright it's fairly small pretty lightweight I wouldn't have minded seeing slightly thicker foam packaging but it's probably not the end of the world because once again it is fairly small and it is fairly lightweight the user's manual I'm just gonna tuck in there and let's go ahead and get this baby opened up so everything we look at about this case it's important to bear in mind the price of it this is a very very inexpensive case on the bottom we find like rubberized grip II things on the fore feet which you usually actually don't see in a case at this price point okay let's flip it over here so this case uses positive pressure in order to achieve its cooling so you can see we have a filtered front 120 millimeter fan in there we have up to two five and a quarter inch base this uses their same kind of meshed filtered so the mesh that we have on here does a couple things it's a fan filter but it also reduces the overall noise output of the case a little bit we've got a fractal design logo right about Yana and front outputs are all done on the right hand side here so we have power to USB 2.0 headphones microphone a reset switch that is recessed so it's difficult to hit actually at all but especially difficult to hit my accident harddrive indicator as well as a power LED now why did I say this case uses positive air flow possibly remember positive perhaps or positive pressure air flow is good because what it does is it reduces the amount of dust that can settle in your case actually here can I get you to move a little bit that way because I think we're going to need this light there so what that means is that if you have a filtered intake that is pushing more air into the case than you're actually removing it means it's very difficult for dust to get sucked into the little gaps around the edges and the end into unpopulated fan holes and things like that so in the back we have a 92 millimeter fan spacing that is actually considered optional it does not have a fan included with it by default so by using just the 120 millimeter in the front and the power supply fan you will have positive internal pressure which keeps the dust out if for example you were to install only fans that suck air out of the case and that and they don't act and you didn't have any filtered intake fans that would mean that all these little holes these ones and these ones would be sucking in unfiltered air and allowing dust to settle in the case so I know I've blathered about that for an awful long time now so don't worry we will at some point actually open up the case if you guys watch enough of my videos you'll probably know this I'm a bit of a fractal fanboy at this point I do really like their overall design they're great at taking sort of a well a lowish price point for the features they deliver and then delivering features that are difficult to deliver at a given price point so I'm pretty interested to see what we find inside here so that's a 92 mill in the back is either an eighty or ninety two mill and then that one we saw at the front one 120 millimeter fan spot like I said fairly low-end case so don't expect you know to it to be too overbuilt compared to something from their defined series or their arc series okay on the inside we find a very very very straightforward internal layout so you got micro ATX compatibility that means for expansion slots as well as your i/o shield here top mounted power supply bottom mounted power supply is totally unnecessary for micro ATX just because we're not talking performance machines that have huge huge old power supplies that need to be isolated from the rest of the system in terms of their airflow so your power supply goes right on the top and it'll also easily reach you know your graphics card or whatever else because it's really just not that far away from anything okay motherboard tray is reinforced using the bending technique so that makes it a little bit more stiff and that is important for a case like this front panel connectors are amply long so you can actually manage those cables fairly easily and you can reach even the furthest away front USB ports or front HD audio ports which on some stupid motherboards are located like here right so you'll have no problems with any of those things as well now here's something that's actually kind of neat I mean totally unnecessary but I kind of need to check this out so well first here let me remove this and check this out guys so you can actually remove with this thumb screw right down here and these two thumb screws up here the three and a half inch hard drive mounting so what that means is that you could actually install the longest possible graphics card in here if you really wanted to build a tiny like tiny look how small this cases for context right guys tiny micro ATX gaming system you could do it because it would be receiving direct airflow from that 120 millimeter fan in the front right and ah you didn't have all the space that you need oh yeah to do is throw a 92 millimeter cooling fan on the side panel exhaust some of that hot air coming off the graphics card you're in pretty good shape so there's your two five and a quarter inch phase there's your hold on a second we figured it out so doing a little bit of research before I started my video might have helped make this easier but check this out that is how the hard drive mounts so you can actually have your long ass video card in this case I have a GTX 590 in here installed and you can have a three and a half inch hard drive because the whole hard drive mounting thing is just on this one strip so you see these rubberized ones that's for your two three and a half inch drives potentially and then you see these non rubber ones these guys right here those are for SSDs so you can either do a single hard drive and then an SSD or you can do two hard drives or you can do three SSDs so cool right and then oh look at that there's another three and a half inch up here as well actually that looks like well huh yeah that better be three and a half inch yeah and then it looks like they're mounting holes on here for an SSD as well so you can install an additional drive here so you could do two hard drives in an SSD by doing it that way so this is a fantastic little case in terms of the design that allows them to cram in hardware even tighter than I have seen in the past not a lot of cable routing options guys it's a very narrow case so there's pretty much no room between the back panel here and the motherboard tray but you know kind of get over it I guess for like 40 bucks what are you expecting exactly so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look and actually fairly impressed first look at the fractal design core 1000 series case don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos