Fractal Design Core 500 Mini-ITX Chassis Review

Complete System

Installing our components into the Core 500 was a fairly straight forward task. Of course, it’s always going to be tricky working in a compact space like this, but we didn’t run into any major issues, despite the fact that we crammed in the fairly large Sapphire R9 270X Tri-X Toxic edition.

As I said before about picking a PSU of the right size, our Seasonic unit has modular connectors that put a little pressure on the back of the GPU, it’s not a problem, but another 2mm and we would have had to switch to a more reasonable power supply; this isn’t Fractal Design’s fault of course.

Cable routing isn’t fantastic on this chassis, but there are enough dark corners to cram excess cables into, keeping them free from any major airflow points and fans.

There’s a lot of space at the top for extra cooling too. I don’t think we’ll need it for this build, but it’s certainly the perfect place for a robust AIO CPU cooler.

The 2.5″ drive mounts work well enough, and line up nicely with that cable routing cut out in the middle.

Lots of clearance for the CPU cooler, as well as a good amount of space around the top of the motherboard for CPU power cables and more.

As you can see, the extra width of the chassis gives us plenty of room for our GPU down one side and the storage drives on the other, with plenty left over for a 5.25″ device.

Since we didn’t install a 5.25″ device in this system, the extra space does come in very handy for storing excess cables, although your choice of components and PSU will vary, so how much space you have here may differ.

All panels back in place and the Core 500 still looks as neat and tidy as it did when we took it out of the box.

If you look closely, you can just about make out our graphics card behind the side panel, where it’s getting plenty of airflow from that filtered vent.