Another season and another case from Fractal! In fact there's three new cases coming out right now, there is Meshify 2 Compact RGB, which is just a slight change from the original Compact, there's also Compact Light and Compact Light RGB. In this video we focus on the Meshify 2 Compact RGB, just consider that the other cases are more budget friendly therefore they have some sacrifice that they've made to make them cheaper. Let's get right into it!
Check out the full unboxing and assembling in the video above.
In terms of the building process - it was very easy because this is a larger case. Just like in Fractal Meshify Mini, there is a central standoff to hold your motherboard in place while you are mounting it which is a nice comfort feature. This tower itself is plenty big for most people even if you load up your motherboard with multiple expansion cards.
At the back there is reasonable space for cable management even with hiding them out of sight, but that would change if you stuff it with multiple drives, so in that scenario you would need to be a bit more tidy than I was.
While doing my rough cable management, I actually pulled out one of the Velcro's completely and then faffed around for a few minutes trying to put it back in, only to realise that I was actually trying to use the wrong hole - joke’s on me I suppose. If you run into this problem, try not to put through the hole, back but rather just behind the plastic clip.
With the general things out of the way - let’s check out the performance of this set-up. Just a quick reminder - we are using Intel 8700K testbench inside with AMD 6700 XT, both have settings locked for consistent results.
First test is noise normalised results at 35dBA where it delivers slightly lower temperature than its smaller siblings on the CPU but is slightly warmer on the GPU.
When we remove the brakes and hit it with 100% fan speed, we get loads of airflow and temperature drops way down to 70 degrees on the CPU and 78 on the GPU but the system also gets much louder - peaking at 51.2 dBa. This is way above comfortable level and I would only recommend having it like this if you occasionally need to render something and need the extra airflow. As a comparison both Mini and Nano peaked at below 38 dBa but they also had less fans.
Which brings me to the conclusion. The more cases we check out the more I struggle to recommend things to you guys. I personally prefer smaller cases, but that is because I like the challenge and tinkering with them (this is why we did that custom watercooling loop in Fractal Torrent Nano). On the other hand, cases like this Compact look good and are easy to work with, and as demonstrated here - have good performance too.
The last variable is price. This Compact RGB comes in at 139.99 in US Dollars or 235 Singapore Dollars over here. That is not the most budget friendly, but you get a proper case with plenty of flexibility, as well as four RGB fans. If money is a bit of a problem, then you still have the cut down Lite version so there is something for everyone.
