Fractal Design Core 1000: How Little is Too Little

Conclusion: A Strange Balancing Act

Producing a good enclosure for the extreme budget sector of the market is, as far as I can tell, an incredibly difficult balancing act. There's a lot of balancing that honestly goes on with any enclosure south of $150, but the latitude you have with which to work just gets smaller and smaller, and when you eventually get down to the $40 price tag that the Fractal Design Core 1000 is sitting at, you start actually having to see if the case supports everything you specifically need.

I don't think the Core 1000 is a bad case by any stretch of the imagination, and it's definitely in the running for the smallest case you can buy at the lowest price. So if you want something small at the exclusion of virtually all else, I just don't see how you're going to beat it. The cooling system is also, at least on paper and mostly in practice, very efficient and a far cry from the old school cheapo boxes with a single sad 80mm exhaust fan in the back. Finally, the build quality is actually quite good, and Fractal Design includes a lot of trimmings that some of you may appreciate.

The problem is that I feel like those trimmings came at too high a cost, and that in a broader sense I'm just not sure the Core 1000 is competitive with more generic budget cases. Much is sacrificed to get this low, and I'm not talking about niceties, either; I'm talking about not being able to have more than two 3.5" hard drives, the one component users are most apt to keep adding over time. The difficulty of installing a full-size mATX motherboard is also a problem, and putting the I/O ports on the right side of the case is a mistake in our opinion. The only other case we've reviewed in this price bracket is the BitFenix Outlaw, which at $10 more is still a slam dunk over the Core 1000 as far as I'm concerned, unless the jump to full ATX is too much.

At $40 it's hard to necessarily go wrong with the Core 1000, and I have no doubt that some users are going to point to this case and say, "See! You don't need to spend more than $40 to get a good case!" The problem is that the Core 1000 is also difficult to work in and with even by Micro-ATX standards and it's frankly pretty noisy for higher spec components. Basically, you need to choose you components and set your expectations properly if you're in the market for this sort of system; we'd recommend a slightly smaller mATX motherboard along with a modular PSU, a modest CPU and GPU, and don't get a large tower cooler. Even then, we feel Fractal Design makes better cases that are better values, but it's like the old saying goes: you get what you pay for. If what you want is an inexpensive mATX case, the Core 1000 is worth a look; just be sure you understand the compromises made with such a platform.