Welcome to my long overdue unboxing of the Fractal Design Core 1000.
Sorry about that. I forgot my knife. Core 1000 microATX computer case. Now,
they call it a computer case, but I because I guess it's hard to call uh a
microATX case like a a gaming case or anything like that. And honestly, this
case is very, very popular with our B2B sales guys uh 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
enthusiast 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 there. Users manual. more of a barebone style
case. Now, it's quite small, which is one of the reasons it's gotten chosen
for some of the uh for some of the designs, uh 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 who u 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 had that they had 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
it last time, he decided he wanted something from NCX, not something from
Dell. So there you go.
All right. It's fairly small, fairly 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 going to 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 grippy things on the four 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 mm
fan in there. We have up to two 5 and 1/4 in bays. This uses their same kind
of uh meshed filtered. So, the 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 here. and front
outputs are all done on the right hand side here. So we have power, two 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 by accident, hard drive
indicator, as well as a power LED.
Now, why did I say this case uses positive air flow? positive. Remember,
positive, sorry, positive pressure air flow is good because what it does is it
reduces the amount of dust that can settle in your case. Uh, actually, here,
can I get you to move a little bit that way? Cuz I think we're going to need this light there. Um, 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 and into um unpopulated
fan holes and things like that. So in the back we have a 92 mm uh fan spacing
that is actually considered optional. It does not have a fan included with it by
default. So, by using just the 120 mm 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 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. Uh they're great at taking sort of a 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 mil. In the back
is either an 80 or 92 mil. And then that one we saw at the front was a 120
millimeter fan spot. Like I said, fairly low-end case, so don't expect, you know,
too it to be too overbuilt compared to something from their Define series or
their Arc series. Okay. On the inside, we find a very, very, very
straightforward internal layout. So, you got microATX compatibility. That means
four expansion slots as well as your IO shield here. Top-mounted power supply.
Bottom mounted power supply is totally unnecessary for microATX. uh 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
air flow. So, your power supply goes right in the top and it'll also easily
reach, you know, your graphics card or whatever else cuz 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 kind of neat. Check
this out. So, okay. 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 3 and 1/2 in 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 case is for context, right guys? tiny microATX
gaming system, you could do it because it would be receiving direct air flow
from that 120 millimeter fan in the front, right? And uh you'd have all the
space that you need. All you have to do is throw a 92mm cooling fan on the side
panel, exhaust some of that hot air coming off the graphics card, and you're
in pretty good shape. So, there's your two five and a/4 in phase. There's your
um 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 longass video card, in this case, I have a GTX 590 in here
installed, and you can have a 3 and 1/2 in 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 3 and 1/2 in 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 uh three SSDs. So, cool,
right? And then, oh, look at that. There's another 3 and 1/2 in uh up here
as well. Actually, that looks like Hold on. Yeah, that better be 3 and 12 in.
Yep. And then it looks like there are mounting holes on here for an SSD as
well. So, you can install an additional drive here. So, you can do two hard drives and 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 uh actually fairly
impressed first look at the Fractal Design Core 1000 series case. Don't
forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.