Review System

Assembly

We prepped the motherboard with the mounting kit of the Lumen S36 before placing it inside the chassis. Thanks to the cutout in the motherboard tray, you should also be able to do all that with an already installed board. Installing the motherboard is done by traditional means, using the pre-installed spacers and provided screws. The center spacer is equipped with a pin instead, so you should run into no issues when aligning your board as well. As you can see, we opted for an M-ATX board with the plan to fill the floor with cooling using the 360 mm Lumens S36 AIO. You may go for a full-ATX board, but there is little reason to do so if you want a similar setup.


The rails are held in place by four screws, and the fans and radiator fit perfectly fine after a little finessing of their vertical placement. Why there is that opening in the ceiling of the Torrent becomes very apparent, as the Lumens S36 needs that room.


As we had to remove the two 180 mm fans to make room for that large AIO, the hope was to install them on the floor of the Torrent Compact, but doing so limits you to both an M-ATX board and a 280 mm AIO in the front. Thus, to keep the intended out-of-the box experience of the Torrent Compact, we installed the Lumen S28 RGB in the floor instead and kept the large 180 mm intake fans in the front. You are paying for the large front fans, so it seems counterproductive to remove them completely. However, even with the default fan layout and an air cooler, you will be blocking the bottom of a full ATX board with anything you install on the floor of the Torrent Compact, which is unfortunate.


Adding a GPU is straightforward, and there is plenty of room even with the two massive fans in the front. Even with an AIO, you should have well over 300 mm to work with.


The power supply in the ceiling should really be the first thing you install inside the Torrent Compact, but we did so once all major components were inside the interior of the enclosure. You should have no issues installing units of up to 210 mm. However, doing so will force you to move the HDD cage towards the front of the case, which will limit you to just one 2.5 or 3.5" drive attached to the tray, as any unit attached to the the underside will get in the way.


To add a 2.5" drive to the Torrent Compact, simply take one of the three plates and screw the drive into place. Once filled, pop it right back in where you found it. The connectors of the drive face towards the back of the case, so while cables may get in the way a little at first, connecting the drive's ports posed no real issues.


The special hard-drive tray in the ceiling of the Torrent Compact can hold either two 2.5" drives or a mix of both size formats. To achieve the latter, simply use traditional screws to secure a 2.5" drive to the underside of the tray before adding a 3.5" variant with special screws through the rubber anti-vibration rings. Once filled, it can go back onto the top of the chassis.


With everything installed, the interior of the Fractal Design Torrent Compact looks alright. There is a cable bunch in the top-left corner of the motherboard as that grommet-covered opening on the right edge of the board is the closest one to route through. Similarly, there is a tiny opening on the bottom left to route something like audio or ARGB cables to, but only a grommet opening on the lower left to feed all the cables from the floor fans and other case cables through. While view of that area is usually blocked by a GPU, if you look straight at it, you would see it. In the rear, the cable mess is mostly contained to the Velcro strips and channel, and you will still have to use zip ties to really bunch things up. Also, with the reduced space between the tray and glass panel, closing this panel proved tricky because of the bunched up wiring, so much so that the glass started bulging even with that single screw holding the panel in place. That is scary to see from a material not meant to flex without shattering, unlike steel, for example. The only way to alleviate this is to spread the cabling around a bit more, which is difficult as there aren't a lot of options to hook zip ties to, either.

Finished Looks

With everything in place and the whole system turned on, the Fractal Design Torrent Compact looks great. In general, Fractal Design has done a great job in terms of designs when it comes to their product range, which also shows with the Torrent family of enclosures. While having the AIO fans push air down trough the floor may not be the most efficient way to cool your CPU, it does give you the best visuals.


In the front, you can see the glow of the two fans well enough for the most part. That same sentiment was noted on the Torrent Nano we also reviewed. However, on the original Torrent, we felt that gloe was not bright enough, which could purely be subjective on our part or due to the the bigger size of the original case variant. You can clearly see into the case from the back, and we were able to use the Velcro strips to secure the power and HDMI cables nicely. That said, there is a definitive limit to the amount of cabling those can hold.


With the lightly tinted glass panel, you can still see all your hardware within the Torrent Compact nicely, and the heavy tint on the opposite side also really helps hide your cable management while still allowing onlookers to make out the SSD, for example. While the black case will help drown out cables messes, the white variant will be far less forgiving.