Fractal Design Define S
Posted: Sat May 09, 2015 8:01 pm
Anyone else checking out this new case? It's being advertised and reviewed as a flexible water cooling case, but I think it looks like a beautifully free-flowing air cooling case too. It's a somewhat refined R5 with the main feature that they've removed all the drive cages, and instead provided 3x3.5" and 2x2.5" mounts on the back side of the mobo tray.
I'm planning a Skylake build for later this year, and it'll probably only have one main system M.2 SSD (backups and everything else use an old file server PC, silently tucked away in a spare room) so I won't really need any drive mounts at all. Some wonder about the lack of any optical drive mount provision, but I've maybe used my current DVD like twice in the past 2 years, so I'm fine with just keeping an external USB DVD around for the very rare times I need it.
And the airflow looks so sweet... I figure I'll put 3 Noctuas in the front, tape off the extra holes in the bottom, and remove the rear hex fan grill and a couple of slot covers under the GPU. The 3 intake fans vs one back exhaust fan will be enough to give some positive pressure even after subtracting the front dust filter's resistance, then a straight, clean shot directly across the CPU and GPU and out the back. Fans dead silent at 200 RPM at idle, and probably even just 400-500 RPMs or so will be plenty to keep the case flushed even at load.
Add in a semi-passive stopped-fans-at-idle GPU like a nice quiet MSI Twin Frozr V... yeah.
I'm planning a Skylake build for later this year, and it'll probably only have one main system M.2 SSD (backups and everything else use an old file server PC, silently tucked away in a spare room) so I won't really need any drive mounts at all. Some wonder about the lack of any optical drive mount provision, but I've maybe used my current DVD like twice in the past 2 years, so I'm fine with just keeping an external USB DVD around for the very rare times I need it.
And the airflow looks so sweet... I figure I'll put 3 Noctuas in the front, tape off the extra holes in the bottom, and remove the rear hex fan grill and a couple of slot covers under the GPU. The 3 intake fans vs one back exhaust fan will be enough to give some positive pressure even after subtracting the front dust filter's resistance, then a straight, clean shot directly across the CPU and GPU and out the back. Fans dead silent at 200 RPM at idle, and probably even just 400-500 RPMs or so will be plenty to keep the case flushed even at load.
Add in a semi-passive stopped-fans-at-idle GPU like a nice quiet MSI Twin Frozr V... yeah.