If you're a fan of Fractal Design's simple and elegant designs, you may be happy to hear that the Swedish vendor is announcing a new chassis, the Define S.
The Define S takes a bit of a turn away from what Fractal Design has done with most of its cases in the past and is aimed at making water cooling builds much easier and friendlier. For this reason, it has a different internal layout from what you'd normally see. The ATX motherboard and power supply are still located where they usually are, and so are the fans and radiators, but where you'd normally mount the hard drives and optical drives, there is just empty space.
The empty area is where you can easily mount a cylindrical reservoir. The case comes with the brackets that you need to mount a reservoir, which is interesting because it enables you to install a cylindrical reservoir without having to drill any holes in the chassis.
Behind the tray where you mount the cylindrical reservoir, there is space to mount up to three 3.5" hard drives, and behind the motherboard tray there is room for another two 2.5" SSDs. The case doesn't have any optical drive bays.
As far as cooling goes, you'll be able to mount up to a 360 mm (3 x 120 mm) radiator up front and up to a 420 mm radiator up top. The rear exhaust is taken care of by a 140 mm fan, and you can opt to mount an additional 140 mm fan at the bottom intake in front of the PSU.
The Define S also comes with Fractal Design's Moduvent system, which allows you to seal off the top of the case if you want to prevent noise from your components from leaking out the top of the case. You can also opt to leave the Moduvent covers off to open up the airflow.
The case has plenty of room for long graphics cards; Fractal Design quoted a maximum length of 450 mm. Of course, installing fans up front, a radiator, and a cylindrical reservoir will reduce the supported length, but most cards will still fit anyway. Just make sure you calculate or measure out how much space all your components will take to see if they fit. The same goes for the radiators -- some combinations may not work, as with any water cooling build.
The Define S measures 233 x 451 x 520 mm, and weighs 8.5 kg when empty.
Pricing for the standard version is $79.99, and a variant with a side window will go for $10 more. Both versions will be available in June.
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