Fractal Design recently released a new chassis, aimed at the people who like a small desktop PC and well, don’t want to spend too much money on a chassis. As such Fractal Design released the Core 3000, an all black, quite stylish mid-tower chassis.

This ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX ready tower chassis can house a pair of external 5.25-inch drive bays, for ODDs (optical disk drives) or anything else that uses that form factor of course. Then on the inside Fractal Design made sure you can house a lot of internal 3.5-inch HDDs as the bays allow six of them to be installed with the top bay being removable, which will allow you to use long graphics cards, and thus create enough space.

The chassis comes equipped with three fans, two 140mm and are placed on top and at the front and a third fan is located at the rear, and is a a 120mm model. For some regulation even a small fan controller is included with the chassis.

The Core 3000 has plenty of cooling options, up to 7 fans in various sizes can be installed. The front panel is easily removable and pre-fitted with fan filters to ensure a dust free interior. The sleek black interior is matched and contrasted with white expansion slots and HDD trays. Similar to the Define Series, all the HDD trays are fitted with anti-vibration silicon grommets. The upper HDD cage is removable and rotatable, which enables support for the longest graphic cards.

Key features

Simple elegant front panel with mesh and filter
Optimized for performance with multiple cooling options
A total of 7(!) fan slots (1x 120mm + 1x 140mm in front, 2x 120/140mm in top, 1x 120mm in bottom,
1x 120mm in rear, 1x 120/140mm in side panel)
Three fans included (1x 140mm in front, 1x 120mm in rear and 1x 140mm in top)
6x white painted HDD trays, with silicone mounting grommets
Upper HDD cage is removable and rotatable
Easily removable front panel with clip on fan slots
Specifications

6x 3,5 inch HDD trays, compatible with SSD!
2x 5,25 inch bays, with 1x 5,25>3,5 inch converter included
4x USB 2.0 and Audio I/O – mounted on top of front panel
Removable filter below PSU (PSU not included)
M/B compatibility: Mini ITX, Micro ATX and ATX
7 expansion slots with sleek white painted brackets
Supports graphic card lengths up to 270mm when removable HDD-Bay is in place
Supports graphic card lengths up to 420mm without removable HDD-Bay
Supports CPU coolers with height of 160mm
Supports PSU’s with a depth of maximum circa 160mm, when using bottom 120mm fan location.
When not using the bottom 120mm fan location, the case supports also longer PSU’s, typically 250mm
Case size (WxHxD): 200x430x480mm with front and top bezel in place
Net weight: 7,1kg
There’s more though, an I/O panel that comes with four USB 2.0 ports and hey there is even room for some liquid cooling a we spot two pre-drilled water-cooling. Now the crucial part, you just read the primary specs… but this chassis is only 200x480x430mm making it a very small chassis. And that makes it interesting, let’s hop onwards to the next page and review the fracker shall we?

Our main criticism with Biostar in the past is PCIe and feature placement.  On one series of products, Biostar has to a certain extent listened – the Z68 series have spaces between the PCIe x16 and space for a PCIe 1x and PCI.  However, the video outputs on the TZ68A+ are all spread out – meaning a lack of USB ports (two USB 2.0, two USB 3.0), only 2.1 channel audio, and no space for multiple LAN connections.  The SATA ports are also odd:

The TA990FXE however goes the other way – the video outputs are nicely positioned, as well as the SATA ports.  But the board offers four full length PCIe all next to each other and no other PCIe available if two dual slot GPUs are used.

Jetway has been producing motherboards for quite a while – if you’ve ever searched Newegg, you’ll find a few products in various categories and price points.  In terms of recent developments, Jetway has surprisingly produced a P67 and a Z68 board – what they deem their ‘Hummer’ series for their enthusiast consumers.  Two main features stand out when looking at the board – one if they have the rights to use the Hummer name in North America, and two that the memory compatibility is only to DDR3-1333 MHz.  You would expect higher-end products for enthusiasts to support the higher end memory speeds, but it’s up to the consumer to decide if they need it apparently. (Apologies for the images, Jetway decided to put a highly reflective glass in front of all their motherboards.)

Jetway have a series of Q67 products, mainly aimed at business and industry: one in particular has up to 10 COM ports possible – at the expense of only having one SATA port.  For AMD, they actually had a Hudson-D3 platform at the booth – again with the Hummer branding, and with 1333 MHz memory compatibility.  Though one thing I do like is that the extra power for the PCIe is at the bottom – as is becoming more common, the PSU is at the bottom of the case, so having this extra 4-pin power at the bottom of the board makes sense.

Giada is a division of the Shenzhen Jiehe Technology Development (JEHE) company based in China.  They have been selling in Asia for a while, and I noticed them starting to sell product over at Newegg for the US market.  So out of curiosity, I stopped by the booth at Computex to examine their range of products and a talk with the sales rep.  Giada’s current situation is to slowly move into various low-level motherboard segments within North America – currently they focus on mini-ITX platforms and the OTX form factor for all-in-one PCs (which is contrary to Intel trying to utilise thin mini-ITX).

For mini-ITX, Giada had an H55, H61 and H67 motherboards on show, all using one PCIe x16 and mini-PCIe.  At first glance the only thing that looks fairly odd is that the SATA ports are found just inside the DIMM slots, presumably making it hard to fit in cables if the slots are filled with memory and/or a large GPU is used.  An E350 Fusion board was also on the show, offering two mini-PCIe, using SO-DIMM memory and a rather odd SATA positioning as well.  I would also point out only one fan header on most of these models, suggesting that no serious coolers or fan controls would be present.

There was an ATX size Z68 on show, but apparently Giada has no intention of releasing this in North America just yet.  From the design, it doesn’t look too bad for the color scheme – there didn’t see much in the way of power delivery for overclocking however, and presumably no support for memory greater than 1333 MHz.

Both boards feature four SATA ports, WiFi and accept standard ATX power (4-pin 12V and 8-pin 12V connectors on the B and A models, respectively).

The A model has two HDMI outputs and one miniDP out, while the B model has two DVI, HDMI and one DP output thanks to the on-board GT 430.

Known as the Z68ITX-WiFi (rough MSRP of $244) and Z68 GT430 ITX-WiFi ($295), both boards are brimming with features, including an unoccupied LGA1155 processor socket, two SATA 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s ports, an assortment of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and headers, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and 7.1-channel audio with an optical S/PDIF output.

Despite their similarities, each board has its own perks. The former offers a second Gigabit Ethernet jack, two HDMI outputs and a Mini DisplayPort connector, and a spare PCI Express x16 slot. Additionally, the Z68ITX-WiFi has a pair of full-size DDR3 DIMM slots and passive cooling enabling a silent machine with the right CPU heatsink and case fans.

Conversely, the latter comes with an embedded Nvidia GeForce GT 430 graphics processor that relies on heatsink and fan combo for cooling. It loses the second network and HDMI ports, but gains two DVI outputs, one eSATA port, and a full-size DisplayPort connector. It also “downgrades” to an open-ended PCI Express x4 slot and DDR3 SO-DIMM slots.