 Welcome to my long overdue unboxing of the Fractal Design Core 1000... sorry about that, I forgot my knife. Core 1000 Micro ATX Computer Case. Now they call it a computer case, but I guess it's hard to call a Micro ATX case like a gaming case or anything like that. And honestly this case is very very popular with our B2B sales guys at NCIX where I work. So maybe I'm just being completely irrelevant when I bring up gaming at all. But Fractal is more known for their enthusiast class of cases so I'm pretty excited to have a look at their Core series because the Core series is, as the name implies, more of a... oh, okay, the documentation is there, user's manual... more of a barebone style case. It sounds quite small, which is one of the reasons it's gotten chosen for some of the designs, some of the system builds that we've done, because it's very very compact and fits in well in like an office environment, something like that, just because of its size. I know we had one guy who needed like 20 of them because this was the only case that he could find that fit the dimensions of the cabinets that they had to fit into. Other than getting like a Dell or something. And that's what he did last time and based on his experience with it last time he decided he wanted something from NCIX, not something from Dell. So there you go. Alright it's fairly small, fairly lightweight. I wouldn't have minded seeing slightly thicker foam packaging but it's probably not the end of the world because once again it is fairly small and it is fairly lightweight. The user's manual, I'm just gonna tuck in there and let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. So everything we look at about this case, it's important to bear in mind the price of it. This is a very very inexpensive case. On the bottom we find like rubberized grippy things on the fore feet, which you usually actually don't see in a case at this price point. Okay, let's flip it over here. So this case uses positive pressure in order to achieve its cooling. So you can see we have a filtered front 120mm fan in there. We have up to two 5.25 inch bays. This uses their same kind of meshed, filtered, so the mesh that we have on here does a couple things. It's a fan filter but it also reduces the overall noise output of the case a little bit. We've got a fractal design logo right about here. And front outputs are all done on the right hand side here. So we have power, two USB 2.0 headphones, microphone, a reset switch that is recessed so it's difficult to hit actually at all but especially difficult to hit by accident, hard drive indicator as well as a power LED. Now why did I say this case uses positive air flow? Remember positive pressure air flow is good because what it does is it reduces the amount of dust that can settle in your case. Actually here, can I get you to move a little bit that way because I think we're going to need this light there. So what that means is that if you have a filtered intake that is pushing more air into the case than you're actually removing, it means it's very difficult for dust to get sucked into the little gaps around the edges and into unpopulated fan holes and things like that. So in the back we have a 92mm fan spacing that is actually considered optional. It does not have a fan included with it by default. So by using just the 120mm in the front and the power supply fan, you will have positive internal pressure which keeps the dust out. If for example you were to install only fans that suck air out of the case and you didn't have any filtered intake fans, that would mean that all these little holes, these ones and these ones, would be sucking in unfiltered air and allowing dust to settle in the case. So I know I've blathered about that for an awful long time now so don't worry, we will at some point actually open up the case. If you guys watch enough of my videos you'll probably know this, I'm a bit of a fractal fan boy at this point. I do really like their overall design. They're great at taking sort of a lowish price point for the features they deliver and then delivering features that are difficult to deliver at a given price point. So I'm pretty interested to see what we find inside here. So that's a 92mm, in the back is either an 80 or a 92mm and then that one we saw at the front was a 120mm fan spot. Like I said, fairly low end case so don't expect it to be too overbuilt compared to something from their Defiant series or their Arc series. On the inside we find a very very very straight forward internal layout. So you got micro ATX compatibility, that means four expansion slots as well as your I.O. shield here, top mounted power supply, bottom mounted power supply is totally unnecessary for micro ATX just because we're not talking performance machines that have huge, huge old power supplies that need to be isolated from the rest of the system in terms of their air flow. So your power supply goes right in the top and it will also easily reach your graphics card or whatever else because it's really just not that far away from anything. Motherboard tray is reinforced using the bending technique so that makes it a little bit more stiff and that is important for a case like this. Front panel connectors are amply long so you can actually manage those cables fairly easily and you can reach even the furthest away front USB ports or front HD audio ports which on some stupid motherboards are located like here. So you'll have no problems with any of those things as well. Now here's something that's actually kind of neat, I mean totally unnecessary but kind of neat, check this out. So first here let me remove this and check this out guys. So you can actually remove with this thumb screw right down here and these two thumb screws up here the 3.5 inch hard drive mounting. So what that means is that you can actually install the longest possible graphics card in here if you really wanted to build a tiny, like tiny, look how small this case is for context right guys? Tiny micro ATX gaming system, you could do it because it would be receiving direct air flow from that 120mm fan in the front right? And you'd have all the space that you need. All you have to do is throw a 92mm cooling fan on the side panel, exhaust some of that hot air coming off the graphics card and you're in pretty good shape. So there's your 2.5 and a quarter inch phase, there's your, hold on a second. We figured it out, so doing a little bit of research before I started my video might have helped make this easier but check this out. That is how the hard drive mounts, so you can actually have your long ass video card, in this case I have a GTX 590 in here installed and you can have a 3.5 inch hard drive because the whole hard drive mounting thing is just on this one strip. So you see these rubberized ones, that's for your two 3.5 inch drives potentially and then you see these non-rubber ones, these guys right here. Those are for SSDs, so you can either do a single hard drive and then an SSD or you can do two hard drives or you can do three SSDs. So cool right? And then, oh look at that, there's another 3.5 inch up here as well. Actually that looks like, hold on, yeah that better be 3.5 inch, yep. And then it looks like there mounting holes on here for an SSD as well so you can install an additional drive here so you can do two hard drives and an SSD by doing it that way. So this is a fantastic little case in terms of the design that allows them to cram in hardware even tighter than I have seen in the past. Not a lot of cable routing options guys, it's a very narrow case so there's pretty much no room between the back panel here and the motherboard tray but you know, kind of get over it I guess for like 40 bucks, what are you expecting exactly. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look and actually fairly impressed first look at the Fractal Design Core 1000 series case. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.