Welcome to our review of the fractal design node 202 we first checked out
this case uh quite some time ago at computex 2016 and have actually had it
in the office for a while but the release has been a little wonko as in to
say actually buying the case has been a bit of an issue seriously there is even
a Reddit thread with people discussing if it even exists now that it does seem
to exist for people looking to buy it let's take a closer
look
ibw Revolt 2 has been redesigned from
the ground up to utilize its small form factor to hold the power you need to
game with confidence check out the link in the video description to learn more
you can see right off the bat that the form factor is quite small when laying
flat it has a width of 377 mm a height of 146 mm and a depth of 47 mm this case
is designed for sfx power supplies up to 130 mm long ITX motherboards and
standard siiz graphics cards or 310x 145 by 47 mm graphics cards that
was a lot of specific dimensions and there's a reason for that the density of
this case is pretty damn High not the highest but high enough that it doesn't
really allow for a ton of play in terms of what you can put inside if you're
interested in this case you should be checking the dimensions of the
components that you're planning to put inside of it this isn't a shot at the
case that all it's just a heads up that you need to be aware of its limitations
during your planning phase starting at the front of the case you have two USB
3.0 Jacks in a black finish dual audio
jacks for your headphone and microphone and an illuminated power button just to
the right of said Jacks there's also a fractal logo on the right hand side
which looks a little odd when you set the case up vertically but fits right in
when it's placed flat looking around the case is pretty standard Fair fractal
went with an unsurprising matte finish all around and definitely didn't skimp
on breathability with mesh areas scattered around everywhere that they
might be useful moving on to the inside of the case we see an elegant yet
simplistic setup comprised of three main zones the power supplies little area the
motherboard split off and the graphics cards whole section all have their own
kind of areas like I said if you go for the option that includes a power supply
you'll be equipped with a 450 W Integra
which should be able to handle basically everything modern that you would throw
inside this case the power supply area also somewhat supports a little bit of
cable management room just in front so you can stuff some of your extra cables
away and leave some breathing room for the air coolers on your CPU and GPU you
will very likely need this Cable Management Area unless you plan on
stuffing all of the spare cables under the graphics card because some of the
even included cables are hella long I
don't know why someone would need a USB 3.0 internal header cable that if you
stood two of these cases beside each other would be able to be plugged into
the other one that being said at least it is a blackedout cable if you do
spring for the included power supply and get the included cables that are kind of
straight out of 2005 with colors all over the place that may be a little bit
disappointing although it also may be fair considering that there is a lack of
a side window the motherboard area is fairly unsurprising although it does
support the start of the PCI Express Riser card you might notice that in the
Glam footage that the screw holes for ours are a little bit off feel free to
ignore this completely this is a pre-production sample and they have
revised this part of the case so that this is no longer an issue on the
graphics card side of the place you naturally have the installation area for
the graphics card an angled support bracket which you can move around to
support whatever kind of graphics card you decide to put in there and some
shared room for the front IO cables
there's also a bunch of extra room under the graphics card for support for 120 mm
fans two of them straddling the middle support bar of the case is an SSD cage
that you can mount two drives in this cage is relatively easy to get to the
only drawback is that the cable management of installing an SSD on the
graphics card side of the case is a little messy there are fan filters but
some of them are rather difficult to get to the filter for the power supply and
the GPU are only accessible if you take the case apart completely I mean taking
the top off and the bottom off although I must say that they are I am happy that
they're included and last but not least is the stand it's fairly stand Fair
sorry for the pun it's made out of plastic and is actually quite solid it
does an adequate job of keeping the case standing upright there's little rubber
feet on the bottom four of them one in each corner and they do an adequate job
of keeping it from sliding around the desk it looks fine but you can do
something that Hardware conu did in their video which I think is quite awesome we're just going to call them
out if you place it down and then put the case down horizontal on top of it it
makes it kind of look like the case is levitating it looks super cool in
conclusion the node 202 is clean quite
dense and even even slightly cheaper than the RV z01 from Silverstone in
terms of positioning I think fractal did a great job for price and what you get
with it it didn't exactly knock my socks off but I also wasn't expecting it to
these small ITX cases that still support full size graphics cards are actually
quite attractive right now and there's a fair amount of them the idea that a tiny
case with a tiny GPU like an R9 Nano is awesome but still not catering to what
most people's desires are so I think this was the right direction to go
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I really just definitely forgot to write this part of the script so I'm going to
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video there we go
cool