Fractal Design Core 1000: How Little is Too Little
by Dustin Sklavos on April 13, 2012 11:35 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- MicroATX
- Mini-Tower
- Fractal Design
Noise and Thermal Testing, Overclocked
It's better to get this out of the way ahead of time: the Fractal Design Core 1000 is not a case for serious overclockers. Mild overclocking and tweaking is fine, but if for no other reason than that it's incredibly small, the Core 1000 really shouldn't be used for anything too extreme. There are budget enclosures out there that have a little more of the headroom the performance-sensitive users are going to be looking for.
Once again the Core 1000 is posting thermals mostly comparable to the Corsair 550D, but remember that again, that's only part of the story. In the meantime, it does prove that it can at least handle a moderately overclocked system. While I wouldn't recommend popping Sandy Bridge-E and an AMD Radeon HD 7970 into the Core 1000, it'll do in a pinch.
The Core 1000's smart thermal design continues to pay dividends. At idle there just isn't that much here to make noise, so if the cooling on your processor and graphics card was pretty efficient and quiet to begin with, the single 120mm fan included with the Core 1000 isn't liable to make things any worse. Under load we still see just a little bit of headroom, but the Core 1000 is definitely noisy.
53 Comments
View All Comments
GPCustomPC - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Never mind, I see now that the heat pipes were hitting the side of the case. I'll be sure to use a smaller cooler such as the CM Hyper TX3 if a customer requests an aftermarket cooler while using this case.DualCaesar - Tuesday, December 3, 2013 - link
I bought it and it has a netting covering the front, I'm not sure if I should remove it or not.
Xoslicer 32 - Thursday, June 11, 2015 - link
in what order do i connect the led lights and power button etc...Thanks!