Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX PC Chassis Review
Peter Donnell / 12 years ago
The build process for the fractal was around 30 mins, but almost half of that was struggling to make cables fit in the chassis properly. All the components slotted into place without much trouble, but cable routing is never an easy task in such a small chassis.
As you can see our Fractal Design PSU is mounted in the bottom left and you can see better how the built in PSU extension cable works. We’ve gone for a little bit of space saving this time around too by using our low profile Akasa CPU cooler, but given the free space available I don’t think you would have too much trouble fitting something larger in terms of cooling.
I had to remove the hard drive mounting bracket on the right to fit our GTX 560 Ti in place, not only because the card was too long with the bracket in place, but to make room for the two 6pin power cables that it requires. I also needed some space on top of the PSU to run cables from the front panel, power supply and storage devices, meaning it was impossibly to to keep all 3 drive brackets with our GPU installed.
If you look closely at the center bracket you can just about make out our side mounted Kingston SSD, even with all these cables we could still easily mount 4 x 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives within the chassis.
This is where I ran into the most trouble, as you can see its just chaotic in the bottom right corner and I had a fair bit of trouble getting them all in there to replace the side panel. While you could use a modular PSU, the plastic connections would then conflict with the rear half of the PSU. So if you are looking to use a long graphics card, you can’t get away with a modular PSU, if you do want to use a modular PSU you will need to consider a shorter GPU or integrated graphics solution.
Just to be clear though, this cable “management” does look worse than it actually is, there nothing in this corner that is being blocked by the mess of cables as the twin intake fans are behind the cables, so they were still providing a good amount of airflow through the drive bays and toward the motherboard.
Our GTX 560 Ti takes is airflow from the left side panel ventilation of the chassis and exhausts out of the back, so no issues with airflow there either.
Around the back and with the chassis cover back in place everything looks neat and tidy. Our graphics card and the 140mm exhaust fan should have no trouble moving heat out of the system.
