Fractal Design Node 605 HTPC Chassis Review

So it seems fractal designs have done it again, just as they did with the Node 304 and the Define R4 I am completely won over by the Node 605. It delivers on all fronts and I found it hard to find any fault with it throughout.

I’m not trying to sound like it’s the best chassis in the world, but it is a very good one and one of the top HTPC chassis I’ve had the pleasure of working with. It’s install process was an absolute breeze, with not issues getting the test components to fit, even though we had to remove one hard drive bay to install the long graphics card, this is how the chassis was designed. It didn’t stop us fitting an i5 + GTX 560 Ti combo within its shell, yet still left room for 2 hard drives, which in most scenarios is more than enough storage space.

Style wise it’s what we’ve come to expect from Fractal Design, managing to be both discrete and almost featureless from the front, but upon closer inspection it’s full of fine details, textures and features which is only added to by the well designed aluminium front panel and it’s hidden I/O ports.

It’s a shame the system can’t handle a slim line optical drive unless you have an m-itx board installed, but given the performance and features of some of the m-itx motherboards on the market at the moment, I hardly see that as a set back.

While it’s not the cheapest HTPC chassis on the market, it was never intended to be. It does however offer faultless build quality that makes it worth every penny and unless you didn’t like its visual appearance there is no reason why you wouldn’t want this as part of you media centre which I why I am happy to award it with our eTeknix Editors Choice Award.