Gadgetory

hey what's going on guys J here bringing you a case review and I haven't actually done a case review in a while on this channel I mean to me to be quite honest it might seem a little bit kind of contrary to what you've seen recently on this channel I'm not a whole lot of a case whore in fact if it holds all of your computer components it keeps things nice and cool and it looks good that's what I think you should go with I don't have a whole lot of opinions when it comes to cases but the fractal design node 804 brings something kind of interesting to the table and that is that this is a cube designed micro ATX computer case so a lot of people are starting to go towards that cube design this is the first one that I've seen that's actually a micro ATX or smaller and you look at the size of this box this is this is not a very big box to be holding something that's a double wide cube design so let's go and take a look at this bad boy from our Swedish friends fractal design now be honest I'm not one of those guys who gets all caught up on the type of packing material that they use to ship a case I mean come on it's a case it's not that heavy for the most part this closed cell foam is going to take the it's going to absorb any the damage that can happen during dropping stuff I just don't get all flustered about packing material like some other people do I mean I wouldn't really recommend ever shipping a case that's got a complete system in it in its own box like this I would always recommend double boxing so if we're if you're even concern about that always double box and use your own judgement when it comes to packing it now when it comes to the actual my hand is stuck I hate that when these little these little flaps go down and then you stick your hand in there and act like a hook that's scary all right there she is now in all of her clothes foam packing goodness static electricity Haven right now it's one of the things I hate most about the packaging of cases is they become just one big giant static electricity farm if you will so you definitely should always make sure you get all the static out of your case before you start building it that's for sure so they got some literature in here and we can just kind of toss that aside so here's the cube right here now one of the things I love already about this case and I'm going to take my ring off for this very reason no I'm not going to marry the case I did not just leave my wife for this case although I will have to admit it is a very sexy case one of the things fractal designs been doing with like the arc series is using kind of a simulated brushed aluminum or brushed metal look and on the 804 they bring you real brushed metal on the front so definite Plus on that now looking at the front here we have some mesh at the bottom and this is for letting in fresh air to the front fans moving around to the left side here we do have our slot load DVD CD drive we have our audio jacks our headphones input output and then we have our power button there's no reset button just a power button and then we have two USB 3.0 moving around to the back you can see that we do have a side by side design and that's what makes this thing a cube now the cool thing about this design is it allows you to keep the compartments well compartmentalized so that you can have good control over the heat your power supply and your hard drives and all that stuff are completely separate from the front side of the case which gives you very good control over the cooling of this now your power supply obviously goes over here it's got nice rubber feet it also has a removable filter but the filter actually removes from the bottom we'll get onto that more onto that in a second and then you have got your thumb screws here that remove all of your panels speaking of panels decide where all of the bits go has a nice clear window on there so there's your nice clear window and it's going to show all of your PC parts very very easily and it just slides off like that now you can kind of get a good idea of how small this case really is I mean it's kind of hard to tell on camera the actual size of this thing but it actually is quite smaller than it looks now top panel comes off the same way here just a couple of thumbscrews and this thing then slides back and comes straight up and you can see the whole top panel is pretty much just one big giant meshed vent so that's good news now that we've got all the panels off we're starting to get a pretty good idea of what this case is made of and as you can see the front pops off just as easily there to expose all of our front panel connectors and our brushed aluminum fascia but one thing I want to show you here as you can see that you do have easily removable filters they are designed to remove from the bottom technically even with the fascia on so let me go ahead and put that back on so you could tilt it forward and then you could pull the front fan filters out this way for easy cleaning because we look at the bottom of the case I'm kind of greeted with my first WTF moment and from that this is why when it comes to the filters now I understand the power supply filter why it comes out the way that it does because it's easier to come out the front and tilt your PC up than it is to get it to move all the way out the back especially if your PC is near a wall or something like that I can actually put that back in there we go so that makes sense tilt it you know pull it forward if you would just tilt it back get to the filter but the thing I don't understand is knowing that I don't understand why the actual side foor of the motherboard is meant to come out of the rear knowing that it's difficult to actually get long piece or fan filters like this out and actually fits in there very very tight I mean look how long this filter is you'd have to pull that quite a ways away from the wall in order to get that filter all the way out it's not it's kind of a moot point though if you're not using any bottom mounted fans on there so just to kind of point that out I don't think that's really too much of a negative I just I'm curious why they didn't make it come out the front I think that would have made a little more sense but once again that's just my opinion now here's the inside of the case everything is sleeved in black it's got black plastic seating or just bare black wire I think that's fantastic here again they go with the white fans and white bits on the inside I do think personally I'd kind of like to see this all black I mean The Blackout are define are for looks so good at CES I kind of wish it kept that going with these other Brandt are these other cases from the same brand go a fan controller right here built-in fan controller with a SATA plug that's a good plus I'm tired of seeing 4-pin molex that's definitely on his way out you get up included 120 millimeter fan on the CPU side and included 100 n again 20 millimeter fan on this side but it is also capable of housing a 140 millimeter on the front we do also have a 120 millimeter intake and that is pretty much it now you can't outfit this with more fans on the top more fans on the front more fans on both sides but this is where you start to really come to the conclusion of there's a lot of give-and-take when it comes to this case if we take a look at the top you can see those fan mounts are completely blocked by the hard drive cages even so where if you remove one of the hard drive cages you're still going to have a little bit of an issue when it comes to clearance because as you can see the hard hard drive cage track you know how well you can see that I'm a try and show it on camera the hard drive cage track still interferes with the mounts for the 120 millimeter fan so really if you want to use fans on this side at all it's an all or nothing you've got to take both cages out if you want to access even one fan slot so that's a little bit of a design choice that I think there was a little bit more compromise than many of us would be willing to make once again because this is on the hard drive power supply side it's not that big of a deal unless you need to utilize these top portions here for additional water cooling because you could put a 240 millimeter radiator on both sides of this as well as the front if you want it but the downside is once again to use a 240 millimeter right on this side you'd have to take the hard drive cages out now I heard a lot of people kind of complaining about the fact that they are hanging drives rather than being horizontally mounted drives I think I agree with that a little bit but I'm not entirely too concerned with it the only the biggest downside for me that I'm a little sad though is the fact that I can't put a 120 on this side and still have the drive cage on there but I think as long as you have a front intake and you have your exhaust on here it's not going to be that big of a deal we are talking about just hard drives and power supply if you don't need to utilize any of this space for water cooling I mean that's kind of what this case is bringing to the table here it's a very versatile cube the only downside to this is it feels like in order to utilize a lot of the functions that's built into this cube you have to make some sacrifices as well we've got some really cool features and it's got really nice pass-through design right here on the floor you can put floor mounted fans on here if you wanted up to looks like 80 millimeter it's got your box of hardware of course and one of the things that I know people have been really excited about is the fact that it does have this different box out of here it does have these large velcro straps on here on the bottom that you can utilize for wire management I think anything that aids in the improvement of cable management is going to be a huge plus regardless of who the case manufacturer is and I really do like this case so guys this has been the note 804 from fractal design pretty much a first look here on Jane's - since we're not really a first look I mean it's been plenty of other people who've done it besides me but this is my first time looking at it getting all hands-on and you know getting all touchy-feely with this thing I wonder if they're going to make a white one it a fractal if you're watching you guys gonna make a white one I think white ones will look pretty badass as well so all right guys I'm gonna go ahead and get the heck on out of here tell me what you guys think about this case down in the description follow on Twitter Instagram Facebook all that social media stuff you want to get a little bit more personal and and talk about tech and PCs and I guess pretty much anything else you'd like to talk about long as it's within reason of course unlike that one time all right guys time to go as always I will see you in the next