Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX PC Chassis Review

Now that we have the cover removed you can see that the general laying inside the chassis is fairly minimal. On the left we have the 140mm exhaust fan and on the right we have a pair of 92mm intake fans. The top left of the chassis also features three fan connections as well as a molex power connector. This takes care of the built in fan controller and will run all the internal fans from a single power cable.

Hard drive mounting is taken care of by these while brackets which are held onto the top part of the frame using thumb screws. They come with a modular approach, where if you need to install a longer graphics card you can remove the left side bracket to create more space for your card. Of course in doing so you will be loosing out on 2 of the 6 drive brackets, so its best to plan ahead oh how many drives you will have installed vs how much space you need for excess cables, airflow or graphics cards.

In the bottom left you can see the hard drive mounting bracket, which is rotated 90 degrees compared to how most PSUs are mounted. The power cable for this is in the bottom right and can be seen running as an extension along the length of the chassis to hook up with your PSU. Mounting the PSU in this fashion allows the exhaust fan of the PSU to blow out of the right side of the chassis, it also frees up space toward the rear of the chassis for the m-itx motherboard and your CPU cooler.

With the front panel removed you can see clearly the pair of 92mm instake fans, which come covered with a snap-on dust cover. As stated before you can see that the chassis doesn’t come fitted with any options for 5.25″ devices such as a DVD or Blu Ray drives.