News Fractal Design launches Define S chassis

Will you get one for a test? Please?

 

WANTWANTWANT..

Been following this case, love that all the storage drives are hidden away and the grommets are at a slight angle so the cables dont bend when been hidden. will look super smart.

And at £69.99 for the window and £64.99 for none windowed nothing else is close to this quality in its price range.

Just wish Fractal Design AIO's where more available, hardly anyone stocks them in the world, never mind the EU
And good riddance for optical drivers! dead just like the floppy!

Can you get one in for a review bit-tech?

 

Feels like there's a lot of wasted space up front.

Perhaps WC experts might elaborate whether this space is good or a bit too much?

 

You're wrong there. You need an optical drive, internal or external, if you want to watch DVD or BLU-RAY films on your PC and if you want to listen to, or rip from, CDs and SACDs. They are also still very useful for any gamers with slow internet connections, who want new games but, don't want to spend many hours or even days downloading.

 

I was purposely exaggerating, but they will die out within the next 5 years i think.
I have a DVD drive, but only ever used it to install my OS..... which i can do via USB now easily and faster.
So i will not be installing it in my next case, so have no need for a drive pay in my next case. Define S would be ideal for me.

Even gamers installing new games rarely use them, so a USB3 DVD drive would be better to use on the rare need for it. Looks better not to have disk drives installed as well. Bulky gray things that mess up the front of otherwise smart uniform front panels.

 

Very nice, about time the optical drive went the way of the dodo. I hope we're going to see "S" cases in smaller form factors too.

If you desperately need an optical drive, you can always just use an external. I think I've used my optical drive about twice in the past year.

 

Hmm obviously not thinking about people who want to use fan controllers

 

...or just make the 5.25" bays removable and meet the needs of more people?

 

1) most current motherboards have very good fan controls, in case of ASUS you can even make your own speed vs temp curve.
2) if you got a crappier board, you can still get something like http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=WC-011-AQ and tuck it away somewhere; you get same/better features than option 1.

 

Yeah, like the Asus Fan Xpert nonsense that didn't work as advertised, and references to it were ignored for months on the Asus forums?

 

Would have been more interesting if they would have folded the drive mounts around the back side of the motherboard tray making it slightly wider and chopped 10+ cm from the depth of the thing. No need for it to still be that deep if you're sacrificing the entire traditional hdd cage... gpu aren't that long these days.
Otherwise it would have been nice to see a huge 12-14 removable hdd bay in that space. I know some people would appreciate something with nice clean aesthetics for server cases. Basically more or less like an ATX version of the Lian Li PCQ26 at a fraction of the price.

 

Had no issues on my X99 Deluxe

 

No 5.25" drive bays! Hurrah!

Thank god.

Definitely want to see an mATX version now.

 

If only every case manufacturer made videos like that

 

Phanteks do - maybe even better than the one above!

 

Ok, now correct me if i'm wrong.. But you could surely make a bit more of a creative design if you're getting rid of ODD bays and HDD cages inside! I mean, sure it'll look really clean inside.. But with all that empty space, it just looks.. Too big!

 

I was actually thinking about some of the bay bus controllers, I use an Aquaero (the lcd version) https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BB-000-AQ&groupid=962&catid=2138&subcat=2139 having the lcd makes it much easier to keep an eye on everything if you need to rather than have the software open in the background to control temps in my watercooling loops and I wouldn't be without something like that or the ability to manually control fans if I wanted to.
Another point is that a lot of people use drive bays for WC reservoirs which counts this out, which is a shame since they have done a great job elsewhere for a watercooling case.

 

They made bunch of mounting support for normal reservoirs (not the bay ones).

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