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Fractal Design Node 202 - Small Form Factor Build Guide

2015-12-19
hey what's up guys Jays two cents and guess what via long waited fractal design node 202 is finally available now considering the fact that this is not exactly the easiest case to build in that would be a good idea to go ahead and do a build guide for building inside the fractal node 202 I mean what do you do when the case you're going to build in is roughly the same size of an e ATX motherboard as you can see it is going to be a little bit of a challenge so hopefully this video will make it just a little bit easier to fit all this junk inside that tiny space okay so you got a lot of components here to fit into a pretty small space so there's some things you got to keep in mind when you build in small form-factor obviously the node 202 is a mini ITX motherboard compatibility so mini ITX motherboards they're a little bit interesting in that all of them pretty much are going to have very different arrangements whereas like standard ATX motherboards typically you've got the 24 pin on the same spot all the PCI Express slots are going to be in the same position all the fan headers are pretty much the same an ITX motherboards they all are going to be very different based on the manufacturer so you're going to want to keep that in mind with the way that things get installed in this case we'll go over that today there's a lot of pre-planning that's involved but mini ITX motherboard specifically in this case four components we are going with the EVGA z97 stinger with a 4790k installed yet probably is a bit of a high end in terms of hardware that we can put in here but then again that's kind of the way we do things around here the most important part though probably is going to be keeping in mind the cooler selection now obviously this is a stock intel cooler and in fact this is off of an i3 so it's even a little bit smaller than the one that would come with the 4790k so overclocking is completely out of the question with this cooler now there are other aftermarket coolers that you can fit in this case it's got to be anything up to 56 millimeters obviously keep it under that so you have a little bit of headroom a lot of the coolers on the market though are taller than that should be very very cognizant of the size of the cooler you're putting on here not - it makes a cooler that fits Coolermaster makes a few coolers that fit but you definitely are going to want to keep that in mind there's not a lot of clearance on the top of the cooler for memory here we've got 16 gigabytes of Corsair Vengeance ddr3 1866 dims again nothing too crazy and then for a graphics card I'm going with a and this is a this is also going to be another part that you want to be cognizant of of part selection is the type of blower or cooler that is on your card this is a 970 SSC here from EVGA it is a it is an atmospheric style card where the heat is going to be put into the case and the cases jobs to remove that heat typically I would suggest a blower style cooler that's something that's got a fan on it that's going to exhaust all of the heat out of the back of the card then the case is a little less involved when it comes to the cooling of the GPU but because I don't actually have a graphics card that is going to meet the power requirements of the included SFX power supply that is in here I had to make some compromises here in fact the 450 watt fractal design SFX power supply in here is going to be a recommended 500 watt for a 970 but we're not gonna be doing any overclocking so we still are going to have enough Headroom but because of the style of graphics card that I'm using I'm decided to go ahead and put two additional fans in this case they do have two 120 millimeter fan expansion slots in the GPU compartment to help keep things cool we are using the fractal design venturi fans here and I did use SP fans instead of the airflow fans specifically in this case because they're PWM and I want to keep PWM control and I also think the static pressure is going to help because we do want to do positive pressure in this case to keep things nice and cool for hard drives it does fit to 2.5 inch hard drive so either hard driver SSDs no 3.5 inch support shows a little bit of a trade-off there which again is kind of a theme when it comes to SFF builds there's going to be some give-and-take now you can get one terabyte SSDs pretty easily now you can get multiple terabyte hard drives so depending on what the ultimate use of this case is going to be home theater PC small form-factor gaming PC you're going to want to be mindful of the amount of storage that you need because it's too small 2.5 inch drives that will fit in here I obviously wouldn't be able to put a lot of let's say digital media on this machine which would lead me to want to use some sort of a Nazz or a home network to kind of put all of my media files on there this is going to be dual purpose it's going to connect to mine as for home media and it's also got the horsepower to run games in the living room which is what I'm ultimately after so now we've gone over the parts selection and why we chose these parts let's go ahead and take the case apart let's show you the way it's laid out and kind of some things to keep in mind when building in this case that way you don't have any surprises when you go to dig in here yourself for the first time so when you open it up you're going to find your accessory box you've got your auxiliary power supply cable here and then the if you get the sfx version it's going to include a 450 watt fractal design 80 plus bronze sfx power supply all of your cables are bundled up in the corner here and then you've got harddrive audio cable or audio cable and then your USB 3.0 and then of course your front panel connectors now there's some things that I would do on here to get set up depending on the way you're going to be doing your build now for instance you've got the SFX over here but as you can see the actual power port is all the way on this side so they've got this cable that's kind of routed through here to the SFX power supply the only problem is it kind of runs over where the fan is so I'm personally going to reroute this cable along the bottom here that way it doesn't interfere with the fan I get sandwiched in between the graphics card the other thing to keep in mind too is like I said kind of do a quick test fit here of your motherboard place it in the you know its proper position and see where everything is going to lay out because the biggest challenge of building in an SFX or a small form-factor power supply is getting everything basically managed when it comes to cables it's there's nothing more challenging than building in something that doesn't have a whole lot of room but yet can still fit a lot of hardware you've got a lot of cables to deal with so as you can see even just getting the motherboard in place here is taking a little bit of preparation but as you can see here the 24 pin is going to be a little bit of a challenge simply because of where it's at it's right next to the power supply so we're going to have to take that cable and kind of squish it up over here our modular our memory dims are right in between that and the SFX power supply so it's going to be very tight all of our fan ports are up here at the top so they're going to be pretty long run from the fan spots over to here and then our eight pin EPS power supply is also all the way over here so there's going to definitely be some planning involved now you might be asking yourself about the graphics card what the hell about the graphics card where do you put the damn thing well they also include these PCI Express riser card which is relocating the power supply into it or the graphics card into its own compartment that way the heat is a bit isolated from the rest of the case because the only opening between these two compartments is this spot right here where the cables run through this opening to get from the two different compartments but once you put together the riser card it's going to basically look like this it gets mounted down in here you'll see that in detail when we do the build and then your graphics card goes right there because we're going to do the optional installation of the fans here because I want as much positive pressure in this case as I can we also have to go a step further and remove the bottom plastic cover right here so that we can actually access that and also in here are your filters here for all of your intakes in your SFX power supply and all of that it's pretty simple to get this off it might seem a little bit scary the first time because they literally are just little tabs that pop on but each one of these tabs you can basically just push them back work your way around and then the thing will come off in one piece ok so once you get those covers off this is what you're left with here is pretty much just a frame which makes things really easy to build in since we're going to do our fans pop the filter off and as you can see there's not a whole lot to it it's really easy to build once you get all of this access to it now one other thing we're going to do real quick before we start this build is we're going to go ahead and remove the hard drive tray or the SSD tray whatever you are putting in here just one screw right here in the middle and want to work a screwdriver screwdriver is a hard slide it forward pull it up and then you come out to SSDs to this we'll set this aside for now and then this is pretty much what you're left with all right well as you can see it wasn't really all that bad the biggest thing with building in a small form-factor case any case that it may be is to plan every manufacturers got their different idea of what would be the best form factor layout and you're never going to get it to be absolutely perfect because they're also at the mercy of the layout of the motherboards like we mentioned at the beginning I kind of feel like the stinger board here is one of the least friendly motherboards to deal with when it comes to building a small form-factor just from the placement of some of the components but we got around that as you can see the stock cooler here I know it's a little bit blasphemous for me to use a stock cooler on a 4790k after all it's all about overclocking it's a z97 chipset but I think we're going to be ok at least letting this thing run at stock speed in fact we'll do it we'll do a temperature test before this video is through and we'll see exactly how it's doing but I'm not too concerned about that the the cables and stuff yeah they're not all blacks lead but then again for the price point of what this kit costs you know with the SFX power supply and the case you can get past that because this is not a windowed case this is it this is a closed up case it's designed to go on your desk or in your home entertainment center and you're just not going to see any of those cables now as you can see right here - I've got the graphics card sitting here we've got the 120 millimeter fans right behind that as we can see right here we'll take the filter off so these are going to be feeding a lot of air onto the graphics card which is also going to be pressurizing this case so that we force some of this cool air over into the compartment where the CPU is and then out the side vents which are all the way around this case so I don't think cooling is going to be an issue noise shouldn't be an issue either we win with the venturi fans not only because it's a fractal case we're like I was put in a fractal fan it's also very low noise I've already done video reviews of these fans as well they're absolutely amazing and I still think the static pressure given what's right in front of them being the graphics card was the right choice rather than going with airflow because there is obstructions on the front and back of this of these fans here especially when we set it down flat which is how it's going to be in my entertainment center now speaking of flat they do also have these rubber feats which you can see right here which simply stick on to the outside of the case make sure you get them you know nice and neat in the corner that one's like disappeared under the case and then they will give you some space between the ground and then the bottom of the case and as long as you have some airflow it's going to be more than enough in the end it all worked out pretty well I think fractal design especially with their SFX power supply in here did a good job of making sure the links are long enough but not too long and given the size of this case like I said this is not much bigger in terms of footprint than an e ATX motherboard just a little bit bigger but not much anyway let's go and do this button to back up let's put it on over here with the test benches and let's just load up some valley benchmark and maybe some a 264 let's see how the temperatures do and then we will end it with that but I think we've got my new homeowner home theater / mobile / gaming rig it's kind of a triple purpose thing here I think it's going to serve me well as it doesn't overheat but I'm pretty confident so let's do that I got the rubber feet on the bottom we've got about a quarter inch a little more than a quarter inch of gap for air flow for those 120 intake fans I installed on there the optional fans and I'm surprised I I ran out for about 15 minutes in a 264 for the CPU anyway thinking that with it upright and the big vent along the side of the case might have actually allowed a little bit more convection where the heat could actually or maybe maybe it's radiation I forget so that the heat can actually make it out the vent on the top and not worry about how much the 120 intakes are pushing and positive positive pressure influence on the temperatures and I'm gonna apologize right now about my eye this is how much I've been staring at the screen the last couple of you know the last day a couple of days actually and it's all red and bloodshot you guys are we were the old eye you guys remember the old Jay who spent all night making these videos and would be like hey guys it's all rigidly uh anyway that I digress back to this I thought maybe laying it flat would give me worse temperatures but it didn't really matter it didn't really seem to matter which way I oriented the case so that's the first thing I want to address second gaming performance I measured temperatures with the benchmark because I could let it run and run and run and run and then I also measured CPU temperatures with 806 for so obviously right now we've got gaming going and I want to I want to point something out remember what I said earlier in the video this is not the most optimal setup I'm not using the right kind of cooler on this CPU I mean the stock Intel heatsink you guys know is they make them with the attention to be throwing them in the trash I know most people are going to ditch those so CPU temperatures are kind of like worst case scenario the graphics card I'm using is a blower style card like this we've got the fans that turn and then the air is pushed out kind of all four sides of the card and then it's up to the case to exhaust all of that heat well obviously this case has no exhaust fans so we are running purely positive pressure with those 120 s to try and push this air out of the case ideally in a case like this I would always recommend going with a blower style cooler like this where all of the heat or all of the air is pulled in here and all of it is exhausted out the back with the exception of some like the Titan have some vents in the backs of some might make it into the case but let's say 90% of the air is going to make it out of these vents in the back which would be most ideal so I don't have the most ideal graphics card in there because I didn't have a big enough SFX power supply to power my Titan or 980ti and then the CPU cooler going with some sort of like a low-profile Noctua or cooler master cpu cooler that's fifty six millimeters in height or lower would have definitely been more ideal so with that said in that justification as I know it sounds like I'm trying to make up for bad numbers they're really not bad at all I just wanted to make sure you guys know these are things to keep in mind when you build in this specific case GPU temperature right now is sitting at well it's bouncing between 79 and 81 depending on the test and this has been running for about a half hour so that's pretty good temperatures are fairly stabilized that's heaven at 1080p with tessellation on normal and all the DirectX features on anti-aliasing up for X and then we'll open up MSI Afterburner here we can see how things were doing see our CPU temperatures during during this will hover in anywhere between 50 and 76 degrees Celsius on the core it's not bad at all on the cores of the the CPU you guys know games to be a lot easier for the CPU than say stress testing like a 264 Mac CPU temperature that we achieved was 81 but you can kind of see hopefully the curve right here a little bit where it wasn't it's fairly flat and we already cooled back down to 55 degrees Celsius and the fans are slowing down aida64 I ran this in multiple configurations with the case standing up and laying down like I said temperatures didn't change which surprised me I honestly thought what does 120 is being on the bottom with only a quarter inch around the case for to suck air in that it would have suffered a little bit but it really didn't and that might be because I use static pressure fans and that's why I justified using static pressure instead of airflow given the orientation of the case because that's how it's going to be in my entertainment center our max temperatures reached all the way up to 97 C our average was eighty five point six C now before you guys go holy hell that's hot remember this is an i3 cooler put on top of 4790k and the average is what we care about the maximum on a 264 is always going to measure those spikes and since we were measuring we were stressing the cache we were stressing the floating-point unit calculations and we were stressing the memory we were literally doing we were bulldozing the CPU to see what temperatures would do keep that in mind but the average is what we care about at eighty eighty five point six was our average temperature there and the modern CPUs from Intel don't thermal throttle you something on the mainstream enthusiasts it's a little lower with the x99s and x79 stuff but 4790k will thermal throttle at 105 C so as you can see we had 20 C of headroom before we even started to thermal throttle in this tiny case with no exhaust fans and the wrong CPU cooler so you can see for the worst case scenario more than acceptable anyway guys I hope this videos helped you understand a little bit more but the node 202 that we've been waiting on for so long thanks for fact to Josh from coming down here and helping me get this video together he did some camera work for me and I did all the prep don't get him any credit for this build I did all the work but anyway time to get out of here guys thanks for watching and as always I will see you in the next video inside that show no because then it'd be really obvious it was a dirty joke and remember we only do in your endows around here in your endo and your mom I feel so Paul's hard way right now like with this setup and the way the camera is and like hello welcome to another amazing Paul's video where today we are going to build this graciously supplied computer from a list of sponsors and vendors and at the end it probably won't work but it won't matter because I will still be happy and smiley because that's just the kind of guy that I am hey what's up everybody Jerry here AKA barn achlys and today we're gonna build a computer how many little help because i kind of forgot how to build a computer ladies
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