A Closer Look - Inside

To gain access to the interior, simply remove six screw holding it in place. Fractal Design has kept the interior very simple. The front area is used to hold the seven hard drives. while the rear is inaccessible due to the small SFX 300W power supply.


As there was no manual and no way to install hard drives with everything within the chassis, I removed the entire hard drive cage, by unscrewing four screws. All six 3.5 inch bays have rubber rings, to kill any vibrations. You may install a 2.5 inch drive on the underside of this cage as well. There is a bit of air left between the floor of the chassis and the hard drive cage. The front fan is 140 mm large and features white blades. According to Fractal Design, it pushes 66 m³/h, rotates at 600 RPM and is silent at 9dB(A). This should be more than enough for the ITX form factor. There is plenty of space to the left and right of the fan, so Fractal Design could have moved the fan off the center and make plenty of room to place a slim line optical drive bay on the other side vertically. That would result in a single hard drive bay to be lost, leaving 5 - more than any other ITX case anyways. Even a NAS or home server requires an OS of some sort, which you have to install. This is not an easy task with no optical drive bay present. If Fractal Design was worried about the overall look of the front, they could just use a simple cut-out for a slot in drive, which would still look really cool - especially vertically.


Once everything is removed, it becomes apparent how simple the chassis really is on the interior as well. I have only taken out the hard drive cage and the power supply. You have plenty of space to work with.


Taking a quick look at the PSU, it is by no means a traditional unit. You receive six SATA connectors, one Molex and the required plugs for the mainboard. Looks like Fractal Design got the cable setup made specifically for this chassis. You can even crack it open without loosing any warranty, as there are no labels on there warning you and no screws are covered by any stickers either. Even though Fractal Design advertises the PSU as "efficient", there is no 80Plus logo to be found anywhere. In times where PSU manufacturers are managing to push out 80Plus Gold units, there are simply no excuses for not having even the most basic 80Plus Bronze certification. The interior reveals clean components, with all the coils covered by white stuff to kill any vibrations and high-pitch noise from these components. One thing I noticed is the lack of any heat sinks, so the 80 mm fan needs to do all the work to keep things cool.


Last, but not least, let us take a look at the mainboard connectivity. There are two leads - power and power LED. No hard drive access LED lights, speaker or reset. I would at least have hoped for an hard drive access LED, but you may repurpose the power LED for this purpose instead.