Fractal Design Core 1000: How Little is Too Little

Noise and Thermal Testing, Overclocked

It's better to get this out of the way ahead of time: the Fractal Design Core 1000 is not a case for serious overclockers. Mild overclocking and tweaking is fine, but if for no other reason than that it's incredibly small, the Core 1000 really shouldn't be used for anything too extreme. There are budget enclosures out there that have a little more of the headroom the performance-sensitive users are going to be looking for.

Once again the Core 1000 is posting thermals mostly comparable to the Corsair 550D, but remember that again, that's only part of the story. In the meantime, it does prove that it can at least handle a moderately overclocked system. While I wouldn't recommend popping Sandy Bridge-E and an AMD Radeon HD 7970 into the Core 1000, it'll do in a pinch.

The Core 1000's smart thermal design continues to pay dividends. At idle there just isn't that much here to make noise, so if the cooling on your processor and graphics card was pretty efficient and quiet to begin with, the single 120mm fan included with the Core 1000 isn't liable to make things any worse. Under load we still see just a little bit of headroom, but the Core 1000 is definitely noisy.