**The Meshify 2 Mini: A Compact and Powerful Case**

If you're looking for a compact and powerful build, the Micro ATX case is an excellent option. With its smaller size, it's perfect for those who want to create a high-performance system without sacrificing too much space. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Meshify 2 Mini, a new case from Fractal Design that promises to deliver exceptional airflow and build quality.

**The Case: A Quick Look**

We've taken a quick look at the Meshify 2 Mini, and our initial impressions are overwhelmingly positive. The case is built with the same attention to detail as its larger counterpart, the Meshify C2. The tempered glass side panel provides a sleek and modern aesthetic, while the dark tint mesh top panel offers excellent airflow. The sound-dampened design ensures that this case won't be too noisy for those who want a quiet build.

**Airflow and Cooling Options**

One of the standout features of the Meshify 2 Mini is its exceptional airflow capabilities. With a focus on keeping the system cool, this case is perfect for high-performance builds that require a lot of cooling. The top fan has a 140mm radiator support, while the bottom has a 120mm support, providing ample space for radiators and fans. This makes it an excellent choice for those who want to run a 280mm front radiator.

**Connectivity Options**

The Meshify 2 Mini also offers a range of connectivity options, including two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, and a headphone microphone jack. The case also features a USB-C port on the top, providing a convenient way to charge your devices. However, it's worth noting that there is no USB 2.0 port, which may be a drawback for those who need higher speeds.

**Fractal Design's Optional Accessories**

As with most Fractal Design cases, there are optional accessories available for the Meshify 2 Mini. These include additional hard drive mounts and cable management options, which can help to keep the case tidy and organized. The manual is also published online, providing users with configuration ideas and tips for getting the most out of their system.

**Comparison to the Define 7 Mini**

For those who are familiar with the Define 7 Mini, it's worth noting that the Meshify 2 Mini offers a few key differences. While both cases have excellent airflow capabilities, the Meshify 2 Mini has a more aggressive mesh design, which provides even better airflow. The sound-dampened top panel is also missing in action on the Meshify 2 Mini, but this may not be a significant issue for those who prioritize airflow over quiet operation.

**Conclusion**

Overall, the Meshify 2 Mini is an excellent choice for those looking to build a compact and powerful system. With its exceptional airflow capabilities, range of connectivity options, and high-quality build materials, it's sure to please even the most discerning builders. While there may be some drawbacks, such as the lack of USB 2.0 ports, these are minor issues that don't detract from the case's overall performance.

**Specifications:**

* Case type: Micro ATX

* Dimensions: 17.5 x 7.8 x 14.9 inches

* Materials: Steel and aluminum

* Fans: Top fan has a 140mm radiator support, bottom has a 120mm support

* Connectivity options: USB 3.0 ports (2), USB-C port, headphone microphone jack

* Optional accessories: Additional hard drive mounts, cable management options

* Price: TBA

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmicro atx micro atx doesn't get enough love i would go so far as to say that micro atx is the new itx for people that are tired of itx's nonsense okay sure it's a it's a little bit of a calling it's a little bit of a mid-life crisis i'm gonna cram 16 cores in a tiny little package and it's going to be super awesome and it's going to be water cooled yeah i've done that build i've done those videos it is a lot of fun maintenance is not a lot of fun the build is not easy you got to be fairly experienced or paint by numbers with some parts that somebody else has already figured out micro atx on the other hand is pretty easy micro atx is a first time build no problem and i'm not saying that itx is as hard as a first time build i'm just saying that a compact build with itx can go pretty nuts but you don't have to go off the reservation at all in order to get a really nice system that's micro atx so to that end we've got our asrock b660m steel legend and our prime b660md4 because you saw the title fractals launching new cases today the meshfy too many the define seven mini we'll start with the define seven mini because i think you know what you're getting into with the mesh52 mini sound dampening material and dust filtration on our nice metal front panel now the defined 7 and i have a long history in fact the defined 7xl is one of my favorite cases for building i like it so much that i made mine wood grain because well i like wood grain this is easily moddable as well i could probably do that with this so this is a micro atx case it's tiny it's portable you can carry it has a tempered glass side panel it's available in a bunch of colors i've got the black one with the light tint on the tempered glass there's a bunch of configurations available and this has pretty much all the features that you'd expect for the defined seven except it's micro atx now it is four slot at the back there are some micro atx cases out there that are five slot but there's not really a lot of micro atx motherboards on the market they give you two x16 slots wired to the cpu so that you can run dual gpus in fact dual gpu's not really much of a thing there's a couple people on the level one forum that have built really amazing systems for a gpu passthrough in an atx configuration in systems that have a micro atx motherboard with the by eight by eight configuration and that's that's that is really impressive but yeah i mean maybe maybe step it up to atx if you're gonna do something that fancy but otherwise it's still the same feature set you've got the top dust filter if you're going to use this as an intake this part is removable which makes motherboard and radiator installation pretty easy sound dampened side panels sound dampened front sound dampened top comes pre-installed it's designed to work with a standard size atx power supply but of course it will work with sff or sffl power supplies it has built-in usb type-c two five gigabit or usb 3.0 gen one ports and two type a usb 2.0 ports now in the accessory box we've got our mini user guide and if you are going to rock the top is intake because remember sound dampening you've got the mesh top which is that same fractal design aesthetic tool-less you're good to go then you get the accessory box which includes your mounting screws your hard drive dampeners if you're going to install mechanical hard drives a couple extra motherboard standoffs power supply screws drive screws and cable ties it comes with two two and a half inch drive positions at the rear that is for a maximum of eight millimeters so eight millimeter drive is a height if you're going to put you know like an octane u.2 back there or do my crazy you know p 4500 drive hack eight millimeters that's not gonna fit in the motherboard tray motherboard trace it's too close to the outside of the case not gonna work but there are other two and a half inch drive mounting options this thing includes two fans one 120 mil at the back and one 140 mil at the front now the gpu max length is 306 millimeters at the front if you have a front fan installed if you go for the radiator your gpu length is going to be more in the order of like 280 millimeters 270 millimeters depending on the thickness of your radiator so keep that in mind when you're doing this build i will call out the two three and a half inch bays that are installed in the bottom here you can also use those for ssds or the aforementioned u.2 if you're thinking hey i think i could shove a 360 millimeter radiator there in the front no this is gonna get in the way of the front panel connections it's not not quite gonna work it might work if you get creative but probably not now me personally a case like this on top of the desk i like the aesthetic and i like the fact that it's not absurdly huge so by default the two and a half inch trays are installed here at the back but you know these these fractal mounting options are pretty universal you can order more online but you are going to you know you want to show off the fact that you've got a p-1500x obtained because those are end of life and going away forever and blah blah there you go now if you've got a lot of pcie peripherals that's going to interfere but generally that is going to work it's going to work really well last thing there are pre-installed velcro cable straps for cable management which is always a nice touch thanks fractal now remember i said this is micro atx but there's no reason that you couldn't use an itx motherboard in here if there's an itx motherboard that's caught your eye and you really like it but you don't want to build a super knuckle scratching tiny build that's really inconvenient well put it in here it'll be fine so let's take a look at the meshfy 2 if you need an absurd amount of airflow so my recommendation for the meshfy 2 is especially if you're considering not going with the sound dampened top panel on the defined 7 mini well you need to be looking at the meshfy not using the sound dampen top panel you lose out on some of the sound dampening characteristics of this case yeah you still got the one sound dampening side panel in the side there probably is going to be a version of this that's dual dampened side panels i certainly like that in the original defined and the front um is sound dampened pulling air in from the side but the meshify is not bad if the fans aren't running super high now you'll notice some differences right away with the mesh phi 2. we still got the top usbc and the five gigabit usb type a ports two of them but there's no usb 2.0 ports we still have a headphone microphone just the same as our other case but yeah none of the other stuff tempered glass side panel this is the dark tint the top is a mesh hence the name mesh phi see what they did there i see what they did there there's only the one style top because hey includes the dust filter because they don't know if you're going to run it as an intake or an exhaust if it's an exhaust you know you can do away with this it's fine now at the front look at that it's a door that opens so that you can do dust filter cleaning like the defined seven you get the 140 in the front and the 120 in the back this one no sound dampening on this side panel but otherwise the feature set should look familiar to you this has the same 167 millimeter cpu cooler clearance 306 millimeter with the front fan and again like 270 280 millimeters clearance with a thick 280 millimeter front radiator you can run a 240 in the top 120s in the bottom or the back got options now as with most things fractal there are optional accessories that you can buy like you can buy more two and a half inch hard drive mounts you can buy more three and a half inch hard drive mounts there is some opportunity to cram some more connectivity in here i recommend you check out the manual because that's published online you can get that before you have the case you can download the pdf and fractal's really good about giving you configuration ideas in my mind 280 millimeter front radiator is basically the thing to do with either one of these configurations the meshify 2 you can obviously configure for a lot more airflow so like your i9 your ryzen 9 5950x would be great in something like this a lot of airflow pretty quiet it'll work well i think with something like this you know the ryzen 5950x again it doesn't use that much power would be fine in the define seven this has been a quick look at the new defined 7 mini and the meshfi 2 mini which you know it's fractal end i don't really see anything to be super concerned about here it's the same fractal build quality as far as i can tell i mean even just banging on it you can tell that it's soundproofed it seems like they've done a pretty good job putting these together i'm really happy with the price points here's a table of all the the cases that are launching today and there are various price points considering the global situation and how much everything else has gone up and blah blah blah yeah and like i say building a micro atx system there's not really a lot of compromises there you can get some pretty high end micro atx motherboards and typically micro atx motherboards are going to be a little cheaper than their atx counterparts feature for feature well that's not necessarily true depends on the feature but for a lot of the features the micro atx motherboard ends up being a little less expensive and the nice thing about micro atx is you have four memory slots and lots more room for accessories on itx they got to cut out a lot typically to the memory slots and a lot more than that so micro atx is sort of the sweet spot of price performance options a lot of stuff i think you should look at micro atx for a compact and powerful build but that also isn't needlessly expensive because uh being tiny costs a lot all right i'm one of those level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forms i have you do a build before these come show it off let's see it share it with the community all right i'm signing out i'll see you there youmicro atx micro atx doesn't get enough love i would go so far as to say that micro atx is the new itx for people that are tired of itx's nonsense okay sure it's a it's a little bit of a calling it's a little bit of a mid-life crisis i'm gonna cram 16 cores in a tiny little package and it's going to be super awesome and it's going to be water cooled yeah i've done that build i've done those videos it is a lot of fun maintenance is not a lot of fun the build is not easy you got to be fairly experienced or paint by numbers with some parts that somebody else has already figured out micro atx on the other hand is pretty easy micro atx is a first time build no problem and i'm not saying that itx is as hard as a first time build i'm just saying that a compact build with itx can go pretty nuts but you don't have to go off the reservation at all in order to get a really nice system that's micro atx so to that end we've got our asrock b660m steel legend and our prime b660md4 because you saw the title fractals launching new cases today the meshfy too many the define seven mini we'll start with the define seven mini because i think you know what you're getting into with the mesh52 mini sound dampening material and dust filtration on our nice metal front panel now the defined 7 and i have a long history in fact the defined 7xl is one of my favorite cases for building i like it so much that i made mine wood grain because well i like wood grain this is easily moddable as well i could probably do that with this so this is a micro atx case it's tiny it's portable you can carry it has a tempered glass side panel it's available in a bunch of colors i've got the black one with the light tint on the tempered glass there's a bunch of configurations available and this has pretty much all the features that you'd expect for the defined seven except it's micro atx now it is four slot at the back there are some micro atx cases out there that are five slot but there's not really a lot of micro atx motherboards on the market they give you two x16 slots wired to the cpu so that you can run dual gpus in fact dual gpu's not really much of a thing there's a couple people on the level one forum that have built really amazing systems for a gpu passthrough in an atx configuration in systems that have a micro atx motherboard with the by eight by eight configuration and that's that's that is really impressive but yeah i mean maybe maybe step it up to atx if you're gonna do something that fancy but otherwise it's still the same feature set you've got the top dust filter if you're going to use this as an intake this part is removable which makes motherboard and radiator installation pretty easy sound dampened side panels sound dampened front sound dampened top comes pre-installed it's designed to work with a standard size atx power supply but of course it will work with sff or sffl power supplies it has built-in usb type-c two five gigabit or usb 3.0 gen one ports and two type a usb 2.0 ports now in the accessory box we've got our mini user guide and if you are going to rock the top is intake because remember sound dampening you've got the mesh top which is that same fractal design aesthetic tool-less you're good to go then you get the accessory box which includes your mounting screws your hard drive dampeners if you're going to install mechanical hard drives a couple extra motherboard standoffs power supply screws drive screws and cable ties it comes with two two and a half inch drive positions at the rear that is for a maximum of eight millimeters so eight millimeter drive is a height if you're going to put you know like an octane u.2 back there or do my crazy you know p 4500 drive hack eight millimeters that's not gonna fit in the motherboard tray motherboard trace it's too close to the outside of the case not gonna work but there are other two and a half inch drive mounting options this thing includes two fans one 120 mil at the back and one 140 mil at the front now the gpu max length is 306 millimeters at the front if you have a front fan installed if you go for the radiator your gpu length is going to be more in the order of like 280 millimeters 270 millimeters depending on the thickness of your radiator so keep that in mind when you're doing this build i will call out the two three and a half inch bays that are installed in the bottom here you can also use those for ssds or the aforementioned u.2 if you're thinking hey i think i could shove a 360 millimeter radiator there in the front no this is gonna get in the way of the front panel connections it's not not quite gonna work it might work if you get creative but probably not now me personally a case like this on top of the desk i like the aesthetic and i like the fact that it's not absurdly huge so by default the two and a half inch trays are installed here at the back but you know these these fractal mounting options are pretty universal you can order more online but you are going to you know you want to show off the fact that you've got a p-1500x obtained because those are end of life and going away forever and blah blah there you go now if you've got a lot of pcie peripherals that's going to interfere but generally that is going to work it's going to work really well last thing there are pre-installed velcro cable straps for cable management which is always a nice touch thanks fractal now remember i said this is micro atx but there's no reason that you couldn't use an itx motherboard in here if there's an itx motherboard that's caught your eye and you really like it but you don't want to build a super knuckle scratching tiny build that's really inconvenient well put it in here it'll be fine so let's take a look at the meshfy 2 if you need an absurd amount of airflow so my recommendation for the meshfy 2 is especially if you're considering not going with the sound dampened top panel on the defined 7 mini well you need to be looking at the meshfy not using the sound dampen top panel you lose out on some of the sound dampening characteristics of this case yeah you still got the one sound dampening side panel in the side there probably is going to be a version of this that's dual dampened side panels i certainly like that in the original defined and the front um is sound dampened pulling air in from the side but the meshify is not bad if the fans aren't running super high now you'll notice some differences right away with the mesh phi 2. we still got the top usbc and the five gigabit usb type a ports two of them but there's no usb 2.0 ports we still have a headphone microphone just the same as our other case but yeah none of the other stuff tempered glass side panel this is the dark tint the top is a mesh hence the name mesh phi see what they did there i see what they did there there's only the one style top because hey includes the dust filter because they don't know if you're going to run it as an intake or an exhaust if it's an exhaust you know you can do away with this it's fine now at the front look at that it's a door that opens so that you can do dust filter cleaning like the defined seven you get the 140 in the front and the 120 in the back this one no sound dampening on this side panel but otherwise the feature set should look familiar to you this has the same 167 millimeter cpu cooler clearance 306 millimeter with the front fan and again like 270 280 millimeters clearance with a thick 280 millimeter front radiator you can run a 240 in the top 120s in the bottom or the back got options now as with most things fractal there are optional accessories that you can buy like you can buy more two and a half inch hard drive mounts you can buy more three and a half inch hard drive mounts there is some opportunity to cram some more connectivity in here i recommend you check out the manual because that's published online you can get that before you have the case you can download the pdf and fractal's really good about giving you configuration ideas in my mind 280 millimeter front radiator is basically the thing to do with either one of these configurations the meshify 2 you can obviously configure for a lot more airflow so like your i9 your ryzen 9 5950x would be great in something like this a lot of airflow pretty quiet it'll work well i think with something like this you know the ryzen 5950x again it doesn't use that much power would be fine in the define seven this has been a quick look at the new defined 7 mini and the meshfi 2 mini which you know it's fractal end i don't really see anything to be super concerned about here it's the same fractal build quality as far as i can tell i mean even just banging on it you can tell that it's soundproofed it seems like they've done a pretty good job putting these together i'm really happy with the price points here's a table of all the the cases that are launching today and there are various price points considering the global situation and how much everything else has gone up and blah blah blah yeah and like i say building a micro atx system there's not really a lot of compromises there you can get some pretty high end micro atx motherboards and typically micro atx motherboards are going to be a little cheaper than their atx counterparts feature for feature well that's not necessarily true depends on the feature but for a lot of the features the micro atx motherboard ends up being a little less expensive and the nice thing about micro atx is you have four memory slots and lots more room for accessories on itx they got to cut out a lot typically to the memory slots and a lot more than that so micro atx is sort of the sweet spot of price performance options a lot of stuff i think you should look at micro atx for a compact and powerful build but that also isn't needlessly expensive because uh being tiny costs a lot all right i'm one of those level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forms i have you do a build before these come show it off let's see it share it with the community all right i'm signing out i'll see you there you\n"