Gadgetory

I'm going to start this video with a quote from our new employee Taran it's not a printer the answer is no in fact it is a computer cube cases are back in fashion and fractal design has thrown their hat into the proverbial box to compete with the existing offerings like The Prodigy M from BitFenix the air 540 from Corsair and the half XB from coolermaster the CM storm SF 17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn more starting with the outside fractals traditional clean Scandinavian design aesthetic is definitely present here the front of the case is a combination of brushed aluminum with a subtle curvature to it and mesh for airflow with a small fractal design logo and power led as the only ornaments on the right hand side we find two front USB 3 ports headphone and microphone jacks and a slimline optical drive mount that actually hides inside the front bezel this is a really smart compromise between wasting space on a bunch of five and a quarter inch bays and omitting them entirely like NZXT did on the aged 440 and when we pop the front bezel off we find not only that slimline mount but also a couple of tuna half inch SSD mounts with some cable management room two dual 120 millimeter removable fan filters and the cleverness continues very very nice the top cover slides off with a couple of thumb screws at the back just like the our committee does revealing some unfortunately difficult lot basically impossible to remove noise dampening foam as well as dual fan mounts on each side on the right is a dual 120 / 140 millimeter fan mount that will work with the 240 or 280 millimeter radiator if you remove the hard drive cages first and on the left is a dual 120 / 140 millimeter fan mount that looks like it would support a two hundred and eighty millimeter radiator but due to clearance constraints with the cooling on your motherboard and memory it supports only a 240 millimeter radiator like we've got in there on the back of the case we find a three fan speed controller settings for low medium and high definitely nice to have but it would have been even better if it was pre cable managed and you know already like plugged in and ready to rock like NZXT does on their cases and we also find a couple more fan mounts boy in this case has a lot of those up to 10 fans total in the front atop and the back the last thing on the back is motherboard IO and 5 PCI slots which is a great configuration since it allows to dual slot graphics cards and an additional PCI Express expansion card in between with certain motherboards such as the sniper that we have installed right now on the bottom of the case are a couple more fan filters it looks like fractal expects this case to be configured for negative airflow since one of them sits right under the power supply and the other sits kind of in the middle of nowhere just as a random extra filtered intake there are a couple of drive mounts on top of it that can be used for three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives we did one of each just to try it out and the only complaint here was that the drives are so close to the bottom of the case that many SATA power connectors will not fit very well and there's only one cable management spot running to one of them so the one on the left is a bit of a tight fit to run power and data two on the left we've got a nice large side panel window that we can remove to reveal one side of the segregated internal so on this side we've got the skinny white PCI slot covers and then on this side the powerful black power supply cables are well wait hold on a second both sides actually have both black and white stuff on them because this is the 21st century Donald anyway with the side panels out of the way we can see that the inside is segregated only for the purpose of creating thermal zones so on this side we've got the N ATX motherboard which takes up pretty much the entire height of the case that's what makes the note 804 so short those two drive slots that I talked about before our AIO liquid cooler that fits but required us to swap low profile memory for the dominators that we had planned to use the design is actually similar to other cubes but the cable management choices that we can see here seemed a little bit odd we've got these two massive holes on the right and at the bottom which combined with the large CPU cutout at the back weaken the motherboard tray significantly then along the bottom we just get zip tie mounting points instead of additional holes for front USB audio and the like I'd have rather seen fractal includes smaller holes for the 24 pin and video card connectors and use that extra strength to put in some other strategic mounting holes instead moving over to the back side we've got room for as long a power supplies you could possibly want and some cool velcro tie downs in the cable management zone that reveal another reason I might like to have smaller grommeted holes on the motherboard tray so I can keep this rat's nest out of sight we also find the bulk of the hard drive mounts in total there are eight three and a half inch drive mounts here but I suspect most people would have trouble actually cable managing all of that in here we used the little spot on the top to simplify routing the eight pin motherboard connector and fan controller cables but there's still just overall not a lot of room to work back here and it was easier to mount our rear hard drive in the second from the bottom slot so that we had room for cables behind it if you were clever enough and used tricks like pre plugging in the drives and then installing them in the case and whatnot this would bring your total up to ten three and a half inch drives and two two and a half inch drives which is extremely impressive especially when you consider that additional fans can easily be mounted to keep them all adequately cool so if you figure it out Wow alright so let's just close with some general thoughts about the case embedded thumb screws are awesome NZXT is using them on their side panels and I want everyone to start doing it they don't cost much more and they really are a hassle saver so you don't lose your screws fractal would have liked to see those included the overall build quality of the case is quite good there is some flex to the chassis without the side down is installed so it can kind of flex it a little bit here but once they're on it is completely rock-solid I love the compactness of this case it feels a lot more space efficient than something like a prodigy that with its feet isn't actually much smaller but only accepts an ITX board and the bunch of drives or an N ATX board and just a couple of drives for that version but those usual challenges with small cases are definitely here building in the case in the first place isn't the easiest thing in the world and upgrades will feel like a chore for full tower users when they need to remove entire hard drive cages just to install one new drive for example it's not a hard core criticism of the node 804 or anything so much as it is a warning for anyone buying it no amount of smart internal design adds volume to the inside of a case so as long as you're aware of what you're buying then fractals latest reimagining of what I felt was a pretty well-established case category gets a big thumbs up from me it's a great choice for a classy looking compact gaming rig and it can also double as a pretty robust storage box as well thank you for watching guys the link for where to buy this product is in the video description below the like dislike and share buttons which I would love for you to use accordingly also in the video description is a support link that we'd also love for you to use if you appreciate what we do you can get a t-shirt give us a monthly contribution or change your browser bookmarks to sites that give us an affiliate kickback when you buy stuff like Amazon it helps us out a lot thank you again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tip for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos