Fractal Design Core 3000 review - Introduction

Fractal Design recently released a new chassis, aimed at the people who like a small desktop PC and well, don't want to spend too much money on a chassis. As such Fractal Design released the Core 3000, an all black, quite stylish mid-tower chassis.

This ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX ready tower chassis can house a pair of external 5.25-inch drive bays, for ODDs (optical disk drives) or anything else that uses that form factor of course. Then on the inside Fractal Design made sure you can house a lot of internal 3.5-inch HDDs as the bays allow six of them to be installed with the top bay being removable, which will allow you to use long graphics cards, and thus create enough space.

The chassis comes equipped with three fans, two 140mm and are placed on top and at the front and a third fan is located at the rear, and is a a 120mm model. For some regulation even a small fan controller is included with the chassis.

The Core 3000 has plenty of cooling options, up to 7 fans in various sizes can be installed. The front panel is easily removable and pre-fitted with fan filters to ensure a dust free interior. The sleek black interior is matched and contrasted with white expansion slots and HDD trays. Similar to the Define Series, all the HDD trays are fitted with anti-vibration silicon grommets. The upper HDD cage is removable and rotatable, which enables support for the longest graphic cards.

Key features

• Simple elegant front panel with mesh and filter
• Optimized for performance with multiple cooling options
• A total of 7(!) fan slots (1x 120mm + 1x 140mm in front, 2x 120/140mm in top, 1x 120mm in bottom,
  1x 120mm in rear, 1x 120/140mm in side panel)
• Three fans included (1x 140mm in front, 1x 120mm in rear and 1x 140mm in top)
• 6x white painted HDD trays, with silicone mounting grommets
• Upper HDD cage is removable and rotatable
• Easily removable front panel with clip on fan slots

Specifications

• 6x 3,5 inch HDD trays, compatible with SSD!
• 2x 5,25 inch bays, with 1x 5,25>3,5 inch converter included
• 4x USB 2.0 and Audio I/O – mounted on top of front panel
• Removable filter below PSU (PSU not included)
• M/B compatibility: Mini ITX, Micro ATX and ATX
• 7 expansion slots with sleek white painted brackets
• Supports graphic card lengths up to 270mm when removable HDD-Bay is in place
• Supports graphic card lengths up to 420mm without removable HDD-Bay
• Supports CPU coolers with height of 160mm
• Supports PSU’s with a depth of maximum circa 160mm, when using bottom 120mm fan location.
  When not using the bottom 120mm fan location, the case supports also longer PSU’s, typically 250mm
• Case size (WxHxD): 200x430x480mm with front and top bezel in place
• Net weight: 7,1kg

There's more though, an I/O panel that comes with four USB 2.0 ports and hey there is even room for some liquid cooling a we spot two pre-drilled water-cooling. Now the crucial part, you just read the primary specs... but this chassis is only 200x480x430mm making it a very small chassis. And that makes it interesting, let's hop onwards to the next page and review the fracker shall we?