Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and I thought about doing just a regular old you know cut-and-dry review of the fractal design nano s I thought one of the best ways to really review the thing considering I'm a die-hard water cooler it's just to go ahead and do a build in it so that's we're going to do today we're do it kind of vlog e style only using the better camera not the ax 33 to try and get you guys at least something you know worth looking at and then come on this face in HD does it really get much better than this whether you're looking for a pump reservoir custom GPU block or a complete loop and a box alpha cools wide range of products can make your next water cooling adventure an easy one click the link in the description for more details so there it is right there you can see it truly is just a really shrunk down version of the defined s it's got a lot of the same functions it's got the exact same aesthetic on the front on the top it's got the side window on the side so it's going to be able to show off all of your components inside it's got the exact same mounting mechanism on the wall so that you can have a place to put your reservoirs cutout tray there for the back of the motherboard which is really nice get access to your coolers and remember this one is designed to be a mini ITX capable of water cooling so that's what my focus is really going to be on today is just how much water cooling we can actually fit into here comfortably so a little better lighting now this is what the guts look like here you can fit a single which appears to be a 140 millimeter fan on the front or two 120 millimeter fans on the front so you can do a front mounted rad same thing on the top here you could do a dual 120 millimeter radiator up top so that's what we're going to be trying to fit in there you got a lot of your grommet pass-throughs right here on the side just like the defined s it's all the exact same concepts here just literally just shrunk down on the back of the motherboard cutout you have a place so you can mount your hard drive or SSDs and then you've also got one right here on the bottom the floor of the case where you can also mount an SSD or a hard drive or a water pump so you fractals really thought about putting a lot of stuff in this case or Mini ITX but Jay I don't get it to fit all that stuff inside a case wouldn't been better just to make it a micro ATX or something like that well that's not really what this case is designed to be now on camera it's really hard to actually translate how small it really is and as I'm looking at this going okay I've got to account for the thickness of radiators and pump and tubing it's actually going to be a little bit of a challenge but they've really set you up to have a lot of options to be able to get this done and get it done right so I'm going to do the best that I can here but I'm gonna be fitting in here a water-cooled GTX 970 gigabyte g1 gaming version maybe putting on the EVGA z97 stinger with a 4790k the exact same one I used in the node 202 build I pulled that out and I'm gonna be putting it in here haven't decided yet if I want to do soft tubing or rigid tubing I kind of like to do rigid I love doing rigid I love to do rigid tubing it just looks so clean and it's shiny but I'm gonna go ahead and see exactly what we can fit inside this bad boy yeah I'm bad I never cleaned this block out fortunately I think I want to do blue blue inside of this build and I'm probably going to be doing believe it or not like a pastel I'm going to be trying out their super pastel and see how that works out but this is going to be kind of a showpiece as well we'll talk about that a little bit in the future but this is probably going to be on display somewhere now just like it's bigger brother it does also feature the mod you vent design which literally just pops out once you pop it out you can see you've got your offset mounting here for either your 120 millimeter fans or your 140 millimeter fans right there so you can do dual 140 s or dual 120 s you just have to keep in mind though that it's not guaranteed to support 140 offset here for water cooling radiators because it does start to get really close to the motherboard so it's going to really depend on the thickness of the hardware that you're putting in here but I do recommend on a on a build like this to go with 30 millimeter radiators at the thickest and then you know standard 25 millimeter thick fans again just like its Big Brothers it's got the giant filter that actually runs the entire length of the case so you can get power supply filter and many bottomed fans that you might have mounted they're all filtered and you can access it from the front so it makes cleaning really easy if this is under your desk or in a cabinet chances are a case this small would be in some sort of a cabinet so that works really well and then just like it's bigger brother it has the magnet for the front magnet closing vent and filter for the front fans really easy to get to really easy to pop off and finishing up the walk-around of the case on the back you can see you've got a harddrive mounting tray right there and then there's the other side of the one I showed you that's behind the motherboard tray so that you can mount your SSDs you know and other things to that so they've really got that really nicely figured out and then of course just like every other fractal case that's been built in the last couple of years velcro straps to keep your cables nice and tidy and nice channeling to keep things as orderly as you possibly can the biggest challenge when building in a small form-factor case is getting the power supply cables in check so that's that's always the challenge and make sure you have plenty of room tuck those away but if you look at the thickness right here on the bottom of the case you can see you've got a pretty decent amount of thickness there for keeping things nice and we need to say come on focus there we go we've got about that much thickness there when it comes to cable depth I know I should have just grabbed a measuring tape I don't have one readily available and I'm being lazy so that's that's just what we're doing I'm gonna show you guys something here that I really AM nerding out about this case I absolutely love is that little notch right there in the frame of the case because these screws even though they are thumb screws are typically tightened at the factory to where you can't get them off with your fingers so you've got to use a screwdriver so instead of having to go in there like some funky angle because the case is in the way they've made that little notch you can actually go straight with your screwdriver I don't know why that that's something that's so simple but I absolutely love that I didn't even know that was there until right now freaking sick all right so I've been sitting here for a while contemplating this in fact longer than you guys even know because I saw this case and like the press material for it long before it was actually launched I'm really late to the party when it comes to getting this review done but I want to do a build not just a review and the part that I saw on paper that concerned me was the amount of room right here as you can see I don't even mention this to fractal design I said you know I'm curious to see how well I can work past the card length and have room here for a front radiator and fans and still have room for a pump and reservoir which technically I could use like this is a knock over my my pump here this is really hard you guys are seeing this in like first-person perspective this is Jay's first-person view what if I wore a body cam some day and built a computer would that be weird I don't know anyway you can use a tiny little reg like this guy here and it'll mount up here no problem but then you have some funky routing of tubes to try and make it all tie in together now the problem is you only have so much room right here between the end of the card and where the radiator will go right here I personally would mount the fans on the filter side ditch the filter put the fans on this side between the backing of the front and then put the radiator on the inside to have easy access the tubes this isn't a problem though it's just a you have to make a compromise here where you either have to deal with going with a small res like this and mounting it there and then putting the pump separate down there and this thing does slide by the way I moved it all the way to the front you can slide it on these tracks in position this where you want it and what I'm thinking about doing is taking this mounting it on the front right here and using my long reservoir so it's you know fills up that space and then only going with a top 240 millimeter red which would more than enough to cool the 970 I have here and the radiator that would go on top we met in the 4790k that'd be more than enough cooling for that so yeah this is how it would look with the longer reservoir and I think that that actually looks better it fills up that space more in fact I wish I had a little bit taller one but that's actually going to be just fine as remember we have to account for the thickness of the radiator that's going to go up top I think this is going to look better ultimately I'm not going to be front radiator in here which I would have really liked to have the other thing is I know some folks are saying why don't you just put a 120 right there on the back well I tried that the problem is it's a very tight space right there and the radiators don't actually fit in that space right there yeah it doesn't actually fit so that's unfortunate you know there is room to put this guy in the bottom but then I've got another issue when it comes to mounting this guy I mean I could have it floating on the back wall I guess I could do it that way but I don't know how well see that's that's the point of why I want to do this review as a build because then you can see the different options in a way of thinking you've got to go through when it comes to installing this well I just learned that there is barely and I do mean barely enough room for me to be able to put the pump there in between and the reservoir in between the GPU it is actually touching the GPU backplate right there and the fans right here and again it is touching the fans it's all just kind of sandwiched in there really not sure if I just want to do if I want to do that and try and do the radiator on the inside because I also learned if you look right there that the fittings fit perfectly between the gaps with it's almost like they thought of this huh yeah it's almost like they thought of this but anyway yeah so I could technically do that and have a dual read but it's not I don't think it's necessary for this build and I do think it's going to become a point where it looks really cluttered it can easily look too cluttered in a case this size and I do think that that's ending up the case right here with these fans having to be sandwiched on the inside here it's actually touching down here against the pump is a little extra room here with the rez versus the pump as you can see it sticks out a little bit right there Wow sounds like I'm in a jungle doesn't it anyway yeah I'm just so torn on this all right so that's what I ended up going with I'm not going to do a front mounted radiator just fans so we can get good airflow in the case and then the as you can see the reservoir is right there now I know a lot of folks are going to ask me what pump and stuff that this is this is just a laying DDC pump with an ek Chrome or nickel plated cover a heat sink cover there on the bottom it's the bits power reservoir combo for the top of it but as you can see it's got to push down tube inside right there so that we can return the fluid from the top it's going to pull the fluid in and it's going to push it out this fitting here and it's going to go right to the graphics card and then through the loop so that's the way that this loop is going to go so flute border is going to go reservoir pump GPU CPU radiator and then back into the reservoir and I know some folks we go shouldn't you go GPU to radiator back to CPU so you're not putting hot coolant into the CPU well the entire loop is going to equalize when it comes to temperature based on how much thermal dissipation the radiator can do so it doesn't mean I'm going to be heating up the CPU by having a GPU under load it just doesn't work that way and I'm gonna have to do a video with temperature sensors throughout the loop so people can see it just doesn't work that way anyway back on topic here let's continue with the build so I spent enough time talking about radiators and pump installs and reservoirs and stuff I'm going to go ahead and build this thing and through the magic of editing you guys will get to see the final results right about well guys here she is I hope you like it yeah this was actually a really fun build to do the define are the fine Nano s I want to call it the finest because it looks obviously so much like it you really can't tell how small this case is on camera but here's my hand I mean if that gives you any kind of indication you can see that the graphics card length is it it goes all the way to the reservoir right there now here's what I want to do I want to talk about a couple things with this a couple things to be in mind you know to watch out for when you're building in this case fractal design is done a great job at designing this case to be able to accommodate a lot of different things a 240 rad up top a 280 rad is not going to work up top at all that's going to be specifically for air cooling and the reason being for that is if you look at the top down on here let's see if I can do this and get it in focus if you look at the top down when you move the radiator from the offset like it is right now how it's all the way to the side more in the middle it's going to interfere with motherboard components and in fact the 240 as it sits is pretty close to making some contact with the memory right here in fact I had to make sure I got low profile memory and something that doesn't have memory heat sinks that stick up because it would literally interfere with the fans the fan does push down with a standard 25 millimeter rate or 30 millimeter radiator and 25 millimeter fans like you can see right there it does hang down over the RAM by about 4 to 5 millimeters depending on you know how thick the actual radiator is and it will it will impact on this if you try and use a 280 rad it's not going to work period the 8 pin bps power is like way back in there so I had to thread that in basically I had to take the whole loop out and plug that in and then put it build everything around it so there's no unplugging that with this loop filled the power supply here is an EVGA 650 g2 supernova it's 80 plus gold as you can see lots of room here for cables this is their custom cable set that you can get to go along with it I went with white because I thought that it was a good pop and I I wanted to kind of incorporate the fractal colors here I did mix up some pastel coolant to match the blue that's on the fans right there as you can see I wanted it to match the the fractal blue so it's kind of a very fractal theme but you could even go with a longer power supply and still have some room right here I did obviously use the built-in pump bracket down there it is on a track so you can slide it so that's how I was able to make it you know clear the graphics card and I'm really happy with the way that turned out now I said on Twitter that I did something with this build that I've never done before and some folks were like oh it's obvious that you didn't bend the tubes well no these are the exact same 90s that I used with the parvum build I just took all those out when I took the case apart they've been sitting in my parts bin and my fittings bin and I reuse those for this but this tubing I did not Bend because it is glass this is glass tubing this was actually sent to be my Mayhem's this is a twelve millimeter OD by nine millimeter ID I believe inner diameter it's actually a smaller diameter than the PE TG but I wanted to do something different so I actually cut this and I I did I looked at tutorials on how to cut glass and I got a glass score this guy right here and then I literally took the glass tubing I chucked it into my drill and then spun the drill while using this to score the glass you squeeze that down and scores the glass and then you literally just snap the glass and then I use files to smooth it out and then that's how I got the glass cut to link I've actually had this glass tubing for a while this was one of the things mayhem sent over after the whole fiasco with them when they were like hey man we're sorry do you want to check out some stuff and I was a yeah sure send it over and they sent over different diameters of the glass tubing I barely had enough but I think it looks great and that brings me to a point some folks on Twitter and Instagram were very judgmental to be like why aren't you bending your tubes that just lazy blah blah blah and making some very ignorant comments it's obvious here there's a reason why I didn't bend these and rather than making an asinine comment on social media why don't you just wait and find out why someone did something if a reviewer does their job well or a builder does her job well they will explain why they did certain things and ignorant comments like that just really aren't necessary I mean I know it's the internet and all but if you had just simply waited because now you know they're glass tubes and that's why it's not been now you can bend glass but it takes a lot of heat and it's amazing how rigid the glass actually is so this is ptg right here on the left and then this is glass right here on the right and you can see just how much thicker the wall is for the glass and this is really I mean it's really robust it's tre stronger than I thought it would be I have no reservations about using glass and a build like this it's very very strong and I will show you guys in a tutorial on how to cut glass I was really easy I was it's the first time I ever did it I don't know who did the glass tubing first I don't really care who did glass tubing first I'm not saying I'm the first person to ever do glass tubing I am saying it's the first time I ever did glass tubing and it's a lot easier than I thought it would be so if what I like about it is the fact that there's not gonna be any clouding whatsoever it's got fingerprints and stuff all over right now but compared to you know the plastic tube I mean you can see in the plastic right there it's just scratched and marred and the glass isn't going to do that so that's why we want glass so all in all I'm really happy with the way the bill turned out if you're curious about performance well I'm not going to do performance numbers on this simply because it's a 970 I've already reviewed and a 4790k that I've already reviewed and the performance numbers are going to be no different it's just a different case and it has water cooling in it but this case does easily accommodate all in one water coolers and as you can see it can accommodate a pretty hefty custom loop in here as well so it's something that it's it's an ITX case of mini ITX case and some folks would be like well it should be bigger so you can go ATX well then that would be an ATX case or it should be smaller well they already have smaller cases they got the note series and you should be checking that out but I think that this case is a perfect footprint for home theater pcs I'm going to actually use this in my living room it's so nice I want this to be seen and I'm really happy with the way that it turned out it was really easy to build in and one of the things too that I did with this loop that kind of want to show you here is the way that I routed these tubes here is it allows me to be able to actually actually get my hands in there as you see I could have filled this area with tubes backing my hand in there and I can can touch stuff I don't really need to necessarily touch things but I can touch them I can't get the ran out though without taking the radiator out so everything is kind of threaded in there fortunately all the hardware was already tested so I knew everything worked but yeah I think I think it turned out fantastic so anyway if you guys like the build you know what to do mash that like button if you guys didn't like it well feel free to tell me why you didn't like it what would you have done differently and tell me what you guys think about the glass tubes if you want me to do a glass tubing tutorial please put it in the comments like the video or tell me on social media please Jay do a glass cutting tutorial that would be I think more people should be using glass and it's not that much more expensive but it is very very unforgiving what I mean by that is there's no doing small trims if you make it a little too long and you've got to be very precise and it's it's actually not that hard i mocked the whole thing up with PE TG and then use the PE TG tubes as my templates for how long the cuts should be and then it was very very easy so I'll do that video soon I'll show you guys how to do glass cutting tutorial regardless whether you guys say now we don't care about it I'm still going to do it anyway guys thanks for watching today's video I hope you've enjoyed it tell me what you guys also thought about this vlog ear Aviv loggy review I think it worked out really well this was more like a vlog II build review it's kind of like the three favorite thing is all mixed into one anyway guys I'm gonna get out of here I'm rambling now thanks for watching and as always I will see you in the next video these builds are possible without you so huge thank you for your support thanks again guys