Review System

Assembly

Installing the motherboard is quite easy thanks to the removable top cover. It is held in place by traditional screws and spacers. As you can see, the board is right up against the top edge with no cable management possibilites. Fractal does provide an opening on the top left corner of the board, but that is too small to route CPU power cables past the bulky heatsink of the ASUS board. To do so, we had to unscrew the board and pre-route the wires, which is not an ideal scenario.


Adding 2.5" drives may be done by either screwing them down to the 3.5" trays or utilizing the 2.5" plates in the same fashion. Once in place, simply put it back where you found them or screw it down on the shroud to show them off to curious onlookers. By rotating the tray 90° you can fit that second drive above it easily.


3.5" drives require you to use the separately included rubber rings by screwing the drive into them as an anti-vibration measure. The new tray allows for a 2.5" drive to be installed underneath the 3.5" variant, which bring the total storage capability of the Define 7 Nano to four out of the box (not counting the 5th mentioned ones in the marketing materials)


For the PSU, attach the plate to it and slide it into the Define 7 Compact through the rear. This is an easy and straightforward process. Due to the width of the chassis, it is nicely tugged away with space for cable routing.


Installing the Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle with its 285 mm length worked just fine initially as the AIO wasn't in place yet. As soon as the liquid cooler was installed, we had to revert to the the shorter Zotac 3060 Ti instead to make it all fit. Considering all the SFF cases out there, this limits you to having to choose between potent cooling or a long, performant GPU.


With everything installed, the chassis makes a pretty clean impression. There are wired going to the center of the board above the GPU because ASUS has opted for some unique stacked PCB design, but that is by no means Fractal Design's fault. In the rear all the wires are kept in an orderly fashion nicely thanks to the Velcro strips and we only had to use a single zip tie to keep some slack bunched up.

Finished Looks

Once turned on, it becomes apparent that the Define series still goes for the understated as much as possible. A white LED that lights up in the center of the front to let you know everything is up and running is the only lighting element specific to the Define 7 Nano.


You can clearly see the RGB elements through the clear window. In the rear, everything is where you would expect it in a modern chassis.