Fractal Design Core 3300 Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Complete System

Total install time for the Core 3300 was just twenty minutes; everything dropped in easily enough and that’s mostly thanks to its vast interior. The hard drive bay was easily removed and our test drive screwed into place with minimal effort; with this bay removed I had an extensive amount of work space to install the motherboard, PSU, water cooling radiator and most notably – the Sapphire R9 270X. With standard hard drive bays there is a good chance that our graphics card would have conflicted with the bays, or that I would have to remove some hard drive bays to make room for the GPU, but I could have fit a significantly larger card in here and still not had to compromise on storage or front panel cooling!

The Corsair H100i fits in the top easy enough and there is more than enough room for the fans without conflicting with the motherboard; of course you may require slim fans if you have a 280mm radiator installed to prevent motherboard conflicts, but most 240mm radiators should be fine with standard fans.

There’s more than enough room for 5.25″ drives, I often find that top mounted coolers can conflict with the top bay, but that wasn’t the case here.

There’s easily more than enough room for multiple graphics cards, with lots of extra space for airflow thanks to the wide chassis design.

The PSU sitting nicely on its rubber mounts and reaping the benefits of that extra wide cable routing cut-out.

Here you can better see the GPU clearance, it’s nowhere near our hard drive mounts; perfect.

The hard drives screw directly on to the bracket, although it’s a shame that there is no side panel window; this would be a great way of showing off a range of SSDs.

All panels back in place and everything looks neat and tidy; a really nice build overall.