Fractal Design Core 3500W Review

Cooling Options

Thus far we’ve been pretty impressed with the 3500W.  Somehow we don’t think that’s about to change when we look at the cooling options open to us.  First up, with 180mm of headroom above the socket it can take just about any tower cooler on the market.  As usual we’ve used our Havik 120 to give a sense of scale and to enable you chaps to compare clearances from one review to another.  As you can see there’s loads of room around it and a clear 20mm of space above it.

     

 

Aside from the ability to take pretty much any air cooler on the market, the 3500W also has prolific out of the box native water cooling support.  Lets start with the front shall we.  With the HDD cage in its secondary position it’s possible to fit a 240mm rad up to 50mm thick or even a 280mm rad up to 38mm thick, although please note Fractal do not claim to offer 280mm rad support in the front.  The real magic though happens when you remove the HDD rack altogether.  With a massive 145mm of space on tap what we’re basically saying is that without any modding what-so-ever this case offers native ultra thick 240 or even 280 rad support.  80mm thick 280mm Alphacool NexXxus Monsta anyone??? 

     

 

If your water-cooling ambitions aren’t as extreme as the possibilities outlined above and you merely want to fit a nice little 240 or 280mm AIO and don’t want to give up your HDD bay then all is not lost.  Far from it in fact.  The 3500W does offer 280mm rad support in the roof, but with only 45mm of room your options are going to be very limited.  The outlook for 240mm based systems is much brighter though, as although there’s only 45mm of clearance between the roof and the motherboard edge, the holes for 240mm rads are off-set inwards permitting the fitting of rad and fan combos that are a tad thicker.  In their technical specification Fractal proffer that thicker rads can be used provided there are no motherboard items that are taller than 38mm in the first 11mm of the board.  In practice an AIO solution such as the Cooler Master Seidon 240 shown below which comes in at 52mm total for the rad and fans combined fits just fine with plenty of room to spare as seen in the images below.  We thought we’d also be able to fit our trusty old XSPC RS 240 but unfortunately at 35mm thick when combined with standard 25mm thick fans it’s just a gnats nadger too thick.  Still with prodigious front rad support we can hardly moan can we?