SPCR

Damnit. I've been keeping an eye on this for a little while, and I was hoping (for the sake of my poor wallet) that there were going to some obvious flaws to put me off. I've yet to read the review in full, but... it's not looking good. Here! Take all my moneys!

Thanks for the review Lawrence.

Lovely looking case. Clean aesthetics, good cooling, full featured in terms of internal 3.5 and external 5.25. Just wish someone would do the exact same thing but lop off ~13cm from the depth, skip the ATX/SFX PSU and go with DC-DC.

Excellent review!

This seems to fix all the little niggles of my Node 304, and manages to cost less too. Sign me up!

I wish they made a tower variant. Short & narrow, please..

The top exhausts seem restrictive, would be nice to have it tested with Kraken X61 and with the restrictive grill cut.
Also, I doubt it's possible to mount both a X41 in the back and X61 top.

thanks for another quality review!

Nice Marmot wrote: Just wish someone would do the exact same thing but lop off ~13cm from the depth, skip the ATX/SFX PSU and go with DC-DC.

+1, sign me up!

I have assembled the system pretty easily. Biggest improvement is the distribution of the hard drives.
The only thing that I would like to see is more explanations about how actually to put drive on the front panel - there should some kind of specific cable, otherwise you can damage the connectors of the drive - it is not convenient.

Highly recommended.

I just got this case in and it does not work well with my components. I have the Asrock H97M ITX AC, Seasonic 460 watt fanless and the Asus Strix GTX 970. The PSU clearance is listed as 160 mm for modular PSUs which matches my Seasonic's specifications. However the modular cables get in the way of the longer video card and I had to mount the PSU upside down to make some additional room. Check out the techpowerup review, they mounted it the same way.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Fra ... 500/5.html

Mounting the PSU this way is pretty challenging because the power cable needs to be plugged in before the PSU is screwed in. It is also very difficult to get it mounted because the PSU cable then gets in the way of the mounting bracket.

The Asrock's PCI-E slot placement is either slightly closer to the edge than other motherboards or the Asus Strix 970 is wider than most video cards because with the cover closed and the magnetic filter attached on the inside the fan will scrape against it. The only way to get it working is to either remove the filter entirely or stick it on the outside of the case.

On the side of the case you're supposed to be able to mount 2 3.5" HDDs and 2 SSDs and the Fractal website says that this is possible. I tried to mount the HDD and SSD on the same side and the cables looked like they would get in the way. All the cables are also concentrated in one area and I really doubt you can get 4 sets of cables there without bending it in a pretty extreme way and putting a lot of stress on the connectors and cables.

fyleow wrote:I just got this case in and it does not work well with my components.

Thanks for sharing.