welcome to my unboxing and first look at fractal designs update to one of my
favorite like awesomely cool cases that I really liked ever the array R2 so the
array R2 was unique because it was a mini ITX enclosure that was capable of
housing an expansion card such as a raid card I did an ultimate Windows Home
Server build in the array AR a while back it was an all aluminum chassis
which had the advantage of being lightweight but the disadvantage of
being relatively fragile and very expensive and it could also house six
hard drives in spite of its incredibly small size this is the node 304 so the
node 304 Builds on that impressive
lineage and updates it to make it more cost effective as well as to add the
capability to install high-end graphics cards something the array R2 was not
capable of doing so it comes with a hard foam
however it's a very small very light case so in this situation I wouldn't
worry about it too much it does seem to be a little bit bigger than the array R2
but that or yeah the array R2 that is to be expected given that it's well
supports more stuff okay so there's a thing in the event of something
something call us and something okay users manual good stuff cool beans all
right got some plastic
here okay very excited about this though guys very excited indeed the ray2 also
had a fairly outdated IO set so this one
updates all of that so we've got uh
indicator power LED fractal design logo very tasteful very small uh brushed
metal front which looks fantastic it's is it metal yeah it's metal um power
button is on the side two USB 3.0 ports headphone and microphone ports intake
vent on this side which uh ah yes so
this one's on this side for a good reason or this like this one's small on
this side for a good reason you want most of the intake coming in over where
your graphics card is going to be if you do opt to put in a large graphics card
the bottom of the case has a nice big fan filter which you can see is is that
magnetic hold on no it just comes in uh
just pops into these little Clips right there if feels good feels nice and snug so once you put it in it's not much
effort to remove it but then once it's there it's not going to go anywhere
accidentally or anything nice big rubber feet 1 2 3 four of those so once you put
it down it's going to be quite stationary at the back you're going to
find yes a 140 mm fan very good stuff
and fractal has also ensured that this fan is going to be compatible with
liquid cooling solution so you can use something like an h60 for example in
this this case without any difficulty
thumb screws are uh hand tight which is nice it's nice to be able to remove
these without running and fetching a screwdriver so let's go ahead and pull
this off so it uses kind of a modular design inside to here hold on first this
is very well built this feels very sturdy compared to uh sort of some of
the lower-end ITX enclosures that I've looked at over the last little while
this is a removable filter right here so you'll be able to pop that off clean it
and put it back uh this one does not have the removable filter however most
of your intake like I said before you're going to want to come through this side
anyway so you're cooling off that graphics card so let's talk about the
modular interface inside so this one can still house up to six hard drives two in
each of these cages which hopefully I
will be able to remove you know what I'm going to need my
screwdriver all right there we go loosen them with the screwdriver so like I said
each of these can hold two 3 and 1/2 in
or 2 and 1/2 in drives it's compatible with either and once you remove ah here
we go one more once you remove this one you can install up to a
310 mm graphics card so that's over
that's yeah over 12 in actually so you could even take something like a GTX uh
580 would be a great example of a longer is graphics card and it'll go in there
very very comfortably see that no hassle whatsoever and you're going to have an
intake directly coming over the card so you can see the way they position the
fan here it's going to be blowing over the front somewhat also this intake fan
here is going to be able to suck air directly from that vent that's right
next to it so you're not going to have to worry about your graphics card temperatures like you do with many ITX
enclosures so the way the hard drive mounting works is actually quite clever
so you screw the hard drives in from either side and then they'll sit facing
opposite directions inside these cages and you take the whole thing and lower
it into the case I'm going to leave this one out for now though just so oh yeah and they're using rubber isolating
mounts so that's really nice and there's a plane flying overhead so hopefully you
guys can hear me okay uh let's finish up with the uh with a look at the rest of
the inside you might have noticed already the absence
of a sorry I've drawn a blank here right
the absence of a 5 and a/4 in drive so I
don't know if you're anything like me you're probably not using a 5 and a/4 in
Drive anymore or you can just get I mean they're like 15 20 bucks just get an
external one for those few situations where you do need one
and I think especially for an ITX space saving design like this it's probably
the right choice ventilation for the front comes from here as well as the
bottom so I'm just going to peel this off so you can see those 2 92 mm fans
which have a removable if I can figure out how to remove it whatever I'm sure
there's a way so they have a removable fan filter on top of them that you'll be
able to take off and clean this is quite easy to remove and all the cables are
let's see I think oh some of these look oh yeah no not permanently attached so
if you ever wanted to I don't know change them or you broke them accidentally or something you'd be able
to deal with that let's go ahead and throw this back on
here there we go uh rest of the Interior so let's figure out where the power
supply goes aha full ATX power supply
bam take that other small form factor enclosures because the ITX board goes
here and then they've routed internally a power cable right here
that's going to go into the back of your power supply which sits here that is why
you have that vent on the other side because that is the exhaust for the back
of your power supply so intake for the power supply comes up through that
filtered intake on the bottom you're going to want to use a power supply with
a bottom mounted 120 or 140 mm fan for
this particular case you can actually have up to quite a long power supply
without running into any difficulty see they've got foam isol uh noise isolating
mounts here here and well here and here
to keep it from putting any undue pressure on the mounting mechanism and
that is that is actually outstanding I love that very very very Innovative
design so they put the power supply right under the drives and then you've
got your ITX board then you got your long graphics card so as long as your
power supply isn't super super long I mean You' be still be able to have you
know something about this long like not bad at all then you won't have any
trouble fitting all the hardware you could want in this tiny little enclosure
including liquid cooling should you so desire it and all the fans are
controlled from this uh high medium low
built-in fan speed adapter here at the back and I think that pretty much covers
it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the extremely exciting and
very cool fractal design node 304 which as I mentioned before is also extremely
well built I mean these are thick steel right here your hard drives aren't going
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