Wednesday, October 7th 2020
Fractal Design Releases Define 7 Compact White Case
Fractal Design have recently announced an updated white version of their Define 7 Compact case. The Define 7 Compact White case features the same open layout found throughout the Define 7 family while keeping a small footprint. The case features a brushed aluminium design with interchangeable side panels and high-density sound damping. The chassis includes two top covers allowing you to switch between solid steel for full noise suppression or a ventilated cover for extra cooling.
The Define 7 Compact White case features a fully removable top panel for easy access to components, ventilated PSU shroud, and extensive I/O including five front USB. The case can support a variety of cooling configurations and comes with x2 Dynamic X2 fans included. The Define 7 Compact White is now available in two versions without and without a side tempered glass panel.
Source:
Fractal Design
The Define 7 Compact White case features a fully removable top panel for easy access to components, ventilated PSU shroud, and extensive I/O including five front USB. The case can support a variety of cooling configurations and comes with x2 Dynamic X2 fans included. The Define 7 Compact White is now available in two versions without and without a side tempered glass panel.
9 Comments on Fractal Design Releases Define 7 Compact White Case
Fractal also get bonus credibility for still offering solid side panels. It's really frickin' hard to buy non-RGB stuff these days but at least I can just cover it all up and don't have to install three different godawful system tray utilities to manage the RGBLED vomit and set it all to "off"....
Define 7: 547mm x 240mm x 475mm
Define 7 Compact: 427mm x 210mm x 474mm
Meshify C: 395mm x 212mm x 440mm
It has two inches of clearance for a radiator above the motherboard but the top panel is solid so you aren't going to put a radiator there.
There are zero optical bays or 3.5" bays in front of the motherboard so all of the 'depth' is for 360mm GPUs. How many people buying 360mm GPUs are looking for a case that says "compact" in the name? Why must people looking for space-efficient cases suffer for this edge-case stupidity? The 3090FE is outrageously large and matches some of the most humungously-oversized monstrosities ever made, and yet it's still under 320mm long; Why does Fractal's 'compact' case need to accommodate 360mm GPUs? I've never seen, heard of, or imagined a GPU at 360mm long. Surely that voids all ATX specifications and makes it incompatible with the ATX standard by default?! How can a case be called 'compact' if it's unnecessarily deep front-to-back solely as a special exception to a monster, XXL graphics card so big that it has yet to be conceived and doesn't actually exist?!
Okay so there are two hard drive bays in front of the PSU. Well a PSU is 150-160mm long and you add another 50mm for chunky 24-pin cable bends and another 100mm for the 3.5" drives, how in the hell do you arrive at 427mm for that lot? Even with 25mm for a fan it only adds up to ~325mm and that's over 100mm of "padding" or wasted space. You could easily shave 50-100mm off the depth of the Define 7 "Compact" (you have to say that word in a mocking, sarcastic way) and it would still fit 99.7% of the components available on the market and 100% of components chosen by people looking for genuinely compact ATX cases. Let's go easy on the Define 7 Compact and say we only trimmed 40mm from the roof and 70mm from the front: That's still a reduction from 43L to 33L which means the current "compact" product is still 30% larger than it needs to be....
No, the Define 7 Compact is not compact. It's a perfectly reasonable full-ATX size that used to be the standard for 20 years before the Vertical GPU, vanity showboat, quad-AIO radiator madness that rode in with the other three horsemen of the RGBLED-tempered-glass-Chinese-flea-market apocalypse.
Man, that was a satifying rant. I'm not even sorry.