One of the best things about case modding is being able to create something unique and show it off online and at LANs. The modding community has been growing even more popular over the past 5 years thanks to events like PDXLAN. Sadly some people just don’t have the time or sometimes the skills to be able to be involved in things like that. I have run into that as well, I get the itch to rebuild but I just don’t have the time to put together what is in my head. In Win has really stepped up over the past few years with a whole series of cases that fill in that gap. They are unique and well built in a variety of designs. We use their H-Frame Mini for our event router and for the past half a year I have used a 901 for my PC at events. Well In Win recently introduced the D-Frame Mini, just in time for me to start on a new event PC. Some of you have seen it, today I will take a closer look at the pro’s and con’s of the D-Frame Mini.

Product Name: In Win D-Frame Mini

Review Sample Provided by: In Win

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

 

Specifications

Colors Available

Matt Black
Glossy Red
Glossy Orange

Material

Aluminum Tubes

Aluminum Metal Plate

Tempered Glass

Internal Drive Bay

3.5” or 2.5” x 3

2.5” x 2

M/B Form Factor

Mini-ITX

Power Supply

ATX12V, PSII and EPS (Up to 220mm)

I/O Port

USB 3.0 x 2, HD Audio

I/O Expansion Slots

PCI-E Slot x 2

Supports High-end Graphic Card

(Length: up to 340mm,Height: up to 150mm)

Thermal Solution

Supports

- 120mm Bottom Fan x 2

- 240mm Liquid Cooling Radiator

- CPU Heatsink up to 165mm

Dimension (HxWxD)

405 x 230 x 501mm

(16” x 9” x 19.7”)

Net Weight

5.25 kg

Gross Weight

7.22 kg

 


Packaging

Even the packaging on In Win’s D-Frame Mini is a step above what they do with most of their other cases. They included pictures of all three of the color options along with the D-Frame Mini logo in the middle. In the background they have a road that seems to of broken up with an unhurt D-Frame Mini “bouncing” off the ground. The same design is around on the back as well but they did still slip in a specification listing over on the side of the box.

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Inside the case is wrapped up in a microfiber cloth bag to prevent any scratches in shipping and then they use foam on each side to keep it protected in shipping.

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Along with the case you also get a full color manual for documentation and a reusable sealed bag full of other goodies. First off, this bag is seriously heavy duty and with the heavy duty resealable top you should be able to put the bag to good use in the future holding extra parts. Inside you get a microfiber cloth to clean the glass side panels, a set of wire hold downs and a bag full of small labeled bags of screws.

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Outside

The In Win D-Frame Mini is a little hard to classify. Is it a mid-tower case? Is it an open air test bench? I don’t really think it falls into either of those categories, but it can fill those roles if you need it too. The overall design is a aluminum tube frame chassis with tinted glass panels on each side that somewhat enclose everything. You can get the case in a glossy red, glossy orange, and a matt black. As you can see we have the matt black model, the orange might have been a little more fitting for us but they didn’t have them in stock at the time.

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What I think really sets the D-Frame Mini apart are the red rubber feet that are on every bar. These feet allow you to position the case in any direction that you would like. This means you could run it as a test bench flat, with the long side on the bottom like In Win has in their photos or if you want you could put the short side on the bottom and give yourself a small footprint and a taller case. 

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Like a few of their other cases, In Win took advantage of materials that most other manufactures use to create a unique and high quality design. On the side panels they use tempered glass. The glass panels on both sides of the case are the same size, with four holes in them. The holes line up with four mounting tabs on the case with rubber pads to keep from scratching things. Black thumbscrews hold things down. What I really like is the slight tint that both panels have, this gives the illusion of an enclosed space while still giving you full view of the inside of the case when you look. When you combine this with LED lighting you can do some unique things. It also means that on the front and back of the D-Frame Mini you have to keep your wiring perfect. You can’t just shove everything behind the motherboard tray and be done with it, not when people can see through your back panel!

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Beyond the side panels, most of the rest of the case consists of the aluminum tubing frame. This to me is the most impressive part of the whole case. Most cases are made of stamped steel or aluminum, this takes almost no time to produce. The D-Frame Mini on the other hand is completely hand made. Lucky for us In Win even sent over a few photos of the entire production process. It’s really no wonder why these cases are priced where they are and why they do limited production runs of them. I think what would really set it all off for me would be to number the cases or at least come with a little card showing who manufactured it.

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It’s a little hard to see on the black case, but each side of the D-Frame Mini has horizontal and angled cross bars that add strength to the case. This really is more like a roll cage for a race car than a PC. The overall strength of this case has to be in a different world when compared to any traditional case design. On the top of the case, in addition to the regular cross members, In Win put in one S shaped bar to make the case easy to carry. To help they even knurled the bar in the center to give you a good grip.

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In a design that has the rear I/O right out of the top of the case (when in normal position) there isn’t a need for a crazy front panel. You get two USB 3.0 plugs, microphone and headphone connections, and a power button with built in status LED.

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Inside

So the internal structure really consists of two sections. The rear of the case has a bracket for the power supply and then the rest of the case is based on a thick motherboard tray. That same tray also handles all of the storage and cooling as well. Much like the exterior of the D-Frame Mini, the inside is still fairly flexible; there isn’t any one specific way to build inside of it. You are however limited to a Mini-ITX motherboard. This isn’t a huge surprise to me, actually I prefer ITX builds, but the size of the D-Frame Mini does seem more like a Micro-ATX case given its size. The In Win 901 felt the same way, I have a feeling as we dig into the D-Frame Mini I will find a little room that could have made things smaller. This isn’t something you think about with Micro-ATX and ATX builds because size isn’t an issue with them, but when you are building with mini ITX there is an expectation that you are building a small PC.

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Up in the top right corner In Win gives you three hard drive racks. Each rack mounts to the motherboard tray using two spring loaded screws. The motherboard tray has a cutout for power and SATA cables on each. The trays themselves have mounting holes for both 3.5 inch and 2.5 drives, both mounting from the underside of the tray. This design is really cool, the drives almost just float out of nowhere. To make remounting the trays to the motherboard tray, In Win did include two small nubs on each tray to help line them up before reattaching. In addition to the three 2.5/3.5 drive mounts, there are two mounting locations on the motherboard tray itself just above the fan bracket.

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layout

Down on the bottom is the entirety of the cooling on the D-Frame Mini. Two fans mount in the included bracket to blow cool air over the motherboard and keep everything cool. The design also means the D-Frame Mini supports a full 240mm radiator and water-cooling, the original larger D-Frame didn’t officially support water cooling at all, so this is a nice improvement over the original design.

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The power supply cage at the rear of the case is also unique. It is designed in a way that allows you to mount your power supply both up or down depending on what you are going for with the build. The cage supports up to 220mm power supplies although I doubt you will really need that much space. This design does mean that you should be able to hide some of your cabling inside of the cage, but I will look into that when building our LAN rig later in this article.

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The motherboard tray in the D-Frame Mini is interesting as well. Take a look at the photo of the holes for the hard drives, In Win used an extremely thick piece of billet aluminum, this one piece alone wasn’t cheap to make. Them machining all of the edges was also a nice touch that prevents any scratches and cuts when installing everything, not to mention it looks a little more polished. The panel itself seems to be covered in a flat black material. I’ll be honest I can’t tell really if it is a powder coated finish or what. It almost feels like a matt vinyl, but I wasn’t able to pick at it and pull any edges so I might be barking up the wrong tree there.

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With the D-Frame Mini, part of what is interesting is what you don’t see. On top of their being no traditional case panels, they also don’t include a rear I/O hole. Just like the 901 there is just an open area where your rear panel faces out. I guess in a way it makes sense, why put a rear I/O panel on a case that is otherwise open but for some it is nice to have the panel for identifying some of the plugs or in my case making sure I don’t miss the hole. What they do include is a support bracket with two PCI slots built into it; this should help support any video card you toss in the case. Speaking of you can fit up to a 340mm long video card in the D-Frame Mini, more than enough space for anything you need.

 


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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Overall and Final Verdict

I’ll get right to the point, I get a lot of products in and I only build rigs for my use with just a few of those parts. When I got the In Win D-Frame Mini in I knew right away that this would be a great case for a new LAN rig. It isn’t as small and easy to carry as my Lunchbox builds but as proud as I am of those builds they just don’t get the same amount of attention as the D-Frame Mini gets at events. On top of that I had more room to really go crazy and pack a GTX 980 into the build. It isn’t perfect though, the open air design does mean a little more cleaning. I was also a little disappointed at the cases size, I felt they could have gone much smaller and still fit the same build inside of it. Or they could go the other direction and support a Micro ATX motherboard, with a small amount of work one will drop in.

On the good side of things, the tinted side panels really set things off. They take the case from an open air design and turn it into a case but still let you get a peek inside at the same time. Using glass for the side panels was just one of the many things that really give the D-Frame Mini a quality feel. You certainly don’t feel like you are getting a tossed together product. The open air design has its benefits as well, when combined with the water cooling that the case supports my build ran cool and quiet and remember this was a GTX 980 and an i7-4790, it’s a bit of a beast. When at the LAN the ability to sit the case in any orientation really came in handy, I was able to sit it vertical and give myself a little more table space. You also have the option to put the D-Frame Mini on its side and run it like a test bench. Versatility is always nice!

So is this a case I would recommend? Well I do think it is an amazing case but it is really going to depend on your budget. Being hand built from high quality materials does push the price for the D-Frame Mini way up to $349.99, this has to be one of the most expensive Mini-ITX cases you could possibly get. Case Labs and others have proven that the price of a case isn’t always a limiting factor, so I’m not going to say you shouldn’t get the D-Frame Mini, but make sure if you do that you plan your build budget around it. With those glass side panels you are going to want to have some cool hardware to show off inside of it as well.

fv4recommendededitorschoice

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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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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