Installation and Performance

Before being able to take the D-Frame Mini with me from event to event, I have to get everything together right? Well a few great companies sent over products for this build, I will be covering those products more in future reviews and hopefully a full look at the build itself along with performance comparisons between it and previous LAN builds. That said, I dove right into putting everything together. To start things off I installed the CPU, RAM, and heatsink to the motherboard (our water cooling came in after the initial installation). With that stuff installed I dug into the bags of screws that In Win included and installed the motherboard. This went quickly, I only had to install four screws and In Win even labeled the bag with those in it.

Next I installed our SSD and hard drive. I decided to go with the combo trays over installing the SSD against the motherboard tray because those two mounting locations block holes that I plan to use for wiring the build. Pulling the trays off was simple, remove two screws and you are set. Mounting the two drives to two of the three trays required finding more labeled bags of screws. Mounting the SSD was easy, install all four screws and you are done. The 3.5 inch drive was a little weirder, only two of the bottom mounted screws lined up. That said, the two screws was enough to keep the hard drive attached and secure. With the drives installed I will say that the hard drive looked like it was floating in the case because it is larger than the tray it was mounted on, the SSD on the other hand looked a little out of place because the tray was so much larger. It would be really cool if there was a 2.5 specific tray that gave the same floating look. Looking back mounting the SSD to the motherboard tray might have looked a little cleaner, especially if I didn’t have a second hard drive.

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Putting our Thermaltake power supply into the D-Frame Mini wasn’t too difficult, like I mentioned before In Win setup the power supply cage to mount both directions. I decided to face the plug towards the top of the case to help hide my wiring on the bottom section of the cage. When it came time to wire everything things did get a little more complicated. Not only are you working in a tight space, with glass panels on both sides of the case I wanted to keep my wiring clean both on the front and back of the case. In the end the only place I could hide extra cabling was in the bottom of the power supply cage. With the room that In Win provided, I was still able to keep things clean. When wiring everything up I did go ahead and wire up the wireless card on our Impact motherboard. I mounted the antenna to the side of the power supply and slipped the cable up under the video card. The one issue I ran into was with the lack of a rear I/O panel. The Impact is unique, the wireless card actually uses a screw through the rear I/O panel to keep it stable and I couldn’t do that in this build.

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Once our water cooling and fans came in I pulled the stock cooler off of the Impact and went about installing it into the D-Frame Mini. This of course included pulling the motherboard back out to install the backplate because In Win doesn’t leave a hole for that, but that was only four screws. Installing the fans into the fan bracket went quickly, the bracket mounts using two of the spring loaded screws just like the hard drive trays. With the cage out I dropped the fans into place and ran screws through the bracket, fans, and into the Thermaltake radiator. The fan cage has two small holes, one on each side that are next to the mounting screws on each side, I used those holes to feed the fan wires through. All in all, the case handled the 240mm water cooling easily.

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So with everything together how well did the D-Frame Mini perform? Well there were three performance aspects that I really had my eye on. How cool does the open air design work, how well does the case work as a LAN PC, and does the open air design mean more dust. First things first, being an open air design I didn’t need to much airflow to keep things cool but the two fans were enough to pull in fresh air. So with the open air design, is the D-Frame Mini a dust magnet? Well it does collect more dust inside the case than a sealed case with a fan filter but I was surprised that it didn’t get dustier than it did. Even with our three cats at home it still looks clean almost a month later on everything except the SSD on top. Cleaning the SSD was quick and easy, I didn’t even have to take the side panel off. The rest of the case is laid out in a way that most dust and dirt actually falls all the way through.

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Taking the D-Frame Mini to a LAN was a little harder than some of my smaller LAN rigs but much easier than the 901 that I have been taking recently. You still have to be careful of the glass side panels when taking it in and out of your card but having a handle made things much easier than the 901. Hooking everything up at the event and in the office was easy with all of the connections facing the top of the case. With everything hooked up things can look a little sloppy with everything sticking out of the top of the case. Most importantly, the multiple ways you can sit the case really comes in handle at LANs. Sitting the short side down helped free up space at my table.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35832 07 Nov 2014 20:18
A few of you may have seen me LANing with this case, now you can find out what I thought about it. Have a great weekend!

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