Fractal Design Torrent Compact Black - Dark tint tempered glass side panels - Open grille for maximum air intake - Two 180mm PWM fans included - Type C - ATX Airflow Mid Tower PC Gaming Case

Product Information

That's a fair amount of load inside a mid-tower case and we consider the temperatures inside the Torrent Compact were absolutely fine. A white case isn’t presently available with RGB fans, and the grey colour option that worked so well on last year’s model isn’t available at all.

Fractal Design Torrent Compact RGB TG Light Tint Review

I don’t like the idea of having a rear side panel being held on by screws because I feel like it’ll eventually shatter. Our editors hand-pick these products using a variety of criteria: they might be direct competitors targeting the same market segment, or they could be devices that are similar in size, performance, or feature sets. All the emphasis is shifted to the chassis, whose fans are tested in three states: 400rpm, 800rpm and maximum rpm. I took the fans out of the case to get a better look at them, and it’s clear Fractal didn’t skimp out on the quality, because they also come with foam dampeners. While that worked well enough we think we may have made a mistake, not least because there is a fair amount of steel in the floor of the case that obscures those huge 180mm 1,200rpm fans.If you want to use a large motherboard, you should opt for the larger original Torrent, or another large case instead. However, this case isn’t perfect – the lack of room for cables behind the motherboard frustrated me to the point where I needed to step away and breathe. A Core i9-12900K under full load is perfectly happy inside Torrent Compact, even with fans configured to a barely audible 400rpm.

Torrent Compact — Fractal Design

But that case is much more restrictive, in that it only supports Mini-ITX motherboards, while the Torrent Compact claims to support boards up to E-ATX. The Nexus Nexus 9P Slim fan hub allows you to connect up to nine fans which is pretty impressive for a case this size. The simple explanation is that we are perfectly happy with cases such as the Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO that rely on 120mm and 140mm fans and do not feel an immediate need for 180mm fans. Built to maximize cooling potential straight out of the box, the Torrent comes with a brand-new component layout and two custom-made 180 x 38 mm Dynamic PWM or Prisma RGB PWM fans. As you can see in our chart, the 180 mm fans on the Torrent Compact do a great job at minimizing sound while providing more airflow than a 120 or 140 mm spinner would.The decibel meter reacts accordingly as fan-speed rises, and you need to get closer to full pelt for noise level to rise above 40dB, which we deem off-putting. Fractal Design Torrent cases allow you to install 180mm fans in the floor and front of the case and house the power supply in the roof so if – like us – you're not much fussed about that feature you may well be feeling a touch of meh. You can screw the panels in on top of the case, which I had to do for the rear/right side panel, to hold the cable bulk in. By launching the Torrent Nano and Torrent Compact, the latter of which we are reviewing here, the company aims to elevate this line to the same status by offering variants in three different sizes. More recently, with the release of the bulky, airflow-focused and feature-rich Torrent, Fractal Design has attempted to do so once again.