Fractal Design Meshify C
Excellent budget offering with not-sotiny tempered glass
THE CASE has the simplest job of all PC hardware: house all the other components, and look good while doing it. Granted, keeping everything cool, quiet, and dustfree is important, too, but compared to the bazillion floating-point calculations your graphics card has to do, it’s an easy life. Yet picking a model that checks all these boxes is never as easy as you’d first imagine. We’re often channeled into distinct routes by manufacturers: quiet cases or cases with great cooling options. Budget cases or cases that don’t tear your hands to ribbons when you try to build in them.
Fractal’s Meshify C forces no such compromise on you in exchange for its $90. As the name suggests, the all-mesh front panel sets the case up for a clear airflow, and despite its budget pricing, the tempered glass side panel offers a highquality aesthetic. Inside, a PSU shroud and excellent cable management options double down on those existing visual and airflow strengths, along with nice touches such as a bracket behind the motherboard where up to three SSDs can be mounted. These can also be removed during a build to allow easy access to the motherboard’s rear when fitting a CPU cooler, which is a real blessing, because fitting coolers is often the most arduous part of a build. We’ve got the scars to prove it.
The enclosure at the Meshify’s base also houses storage bays, and although it’s always preferable to use a modular PSU in this type of setup, in order to make life easier when it comes to cable management (not to mention getting the rear panel back on the thing), we were able to fit a nonmodular PSU, with ample room to store the unused cables between the unit itself and the storage bays. The internal panel on to which the motherboard is fitted also features three handy cutaways at the base, just above the PSU shroud, through which connections at the bottom of the motherboard, such as HD audio and USB headers, can be kept neat and tidy, too. To finish it all off, the side cutaways are fitted with rubber grommets and are slightly angled, which enabled us to make those connections to the GPU that bit more easily.
Despite housing ATX, mATX, and ITX systems, this case runs shorter along its length than most mid-tower models. We like the visual effect of that, and the space-saving, but it does mean that threefan graphics cards are a really tight fit. Fractal’s spec sheet states 12.4 inches of clearance for GPUs and, true enough, we could install our 12-inch Radeon HD 6990, but it was a cigarette paper’s width away from the supplied Dynamix X2 GP-12 120mm front fan. There’s always the option of removing that fan, but it’s something to be aware of if you’re packing an oversized chunk of PCB on graphics duty. Options for fitting more than the two supplied 120mm fans or swapping them out for radiators are good—there are seven fan mounts throughout the case, and room for radiators at the front and top, with dust filters placed here and below the PSU. Bonus points are awarded for a front removal mechanism for the bottom filter—no need to move the whole machine to access it.
We’re left with very little to grumble about. The only obvious concessions to its sub-$100 pricing come in the top panel magnetic dust filter, which isn’t very closely fitted to its inlay and looks noticeably cheaper than the rest of the case, and a flimsy front panel, which has a bit too much give to instil any confidence. That’s literally it: two tiny grumbles about an otherwise exemplary case with features you’d expect from a much pricier model. Meshify, it was a pleasure to build in you. –PHIL IWANIUK