A company that many of you may have not heard about, Fractal Design, invited me to their suite at the Venetian for a private showing of their products. Fractal Design is a Swedish company that focuses on unique and innovative cases. They are not the craziest cases but with growing older I have strayed away from really flashy cases with fans everywhere and crazy lights all over. I for one like a sleek case with a sleek, sexy exterior. With Fractal Design it’s all about clean, sexy lines and useful features that you never knew you needed.
The case that most caught my eye was the Core Series M-ATX case. With all of the LAN parties that us gamers go to now carrying around a hundred pound PC is not a viable option anymore. With internet speeds getting faster and faster we are also requiring more storage and with 2TB drives on the cheap, having five or six drives is not uncommon anymore. If you want a LAN box that you use for going to a friends or LanOC events this is the case for you. On a LAN computer you don’t need five drives. A small SSD and a storage drive are about the extent of your needs. This case can hold all of that and even have enough room for SLi’ed GTX 580’s or CrossFireX 5970’s. The Micro ATX form factor is no slouch either, with motherboard manufactures always pushing the boundaries seeing Hexa-Core CPU’s and two video cards is common place now. The front of the case has a 120mm fan to pull air into the case and also cool the GPU’s. The rear 120mm fan pulls air across the memory modules and exhausts warm internal case air out the rear. The front I/O panel is not on the top but on the lower right hand side. If you are building a small form factor PC then you should really check out this case.
The other item that caught my eye was a very quick build done with a Fractal Design Define R3. This was done from the people over at ORIGIN. As seen in the video below this was a very quick build. The biggest problem with building PC’s is all the wires from the PSU. Case manufactures are starting to include cable routing options that hide the wires behind the motherboard tray.
What sets cases apart are the small details that they come up with. You shouldn’t have to give up space because the HDD’s cages are not removable. With many of the cases that Fractal makes they have the option to turn the cage to improve airflow to the GPU. They also designed the cages to be removable if you need the extra space for longer or an extra GPU.
