Excellent Design: Fractal North Case Review & Benchmarks

[Music] this is frackle's new case the fractal North instantly interesting because of this giant mesh side panel and also the wood accents on the front this follows up fractal's pop air case that we reviewed previously the pop air is sort of visual gimmick if you will was that it had different color Interiors mixed and matched with the exterior so this follows that up and the north shares something in common with this as well this thin is a geometric Futures Cowboy that is the name of it um as far as we can tell they named it that because it has leather on it they're they're for cowboy anyway this also has leather on it there it is that's the leather that's the entirety of it uh but it joins wood on the front so basically what they're doing here is playing around with non-metal non-plastic materials now beyond that Beyond just sort of the visual play that they're doing with different materials there are some interesting practical elements so one of them is the massive mesh panel there's a standard glass panel as well but this is kind of what the mesh option looks like you can see there's some structural reinforcement there and internally immediately we're greeted with an optional fan Mount cage that unfortunately is right up against the GPU so the useful of this will be really limited but we'll talk about that this can move actually up here as well this is a separate panel and the mesh if you notice continues all the way up to the top panel so doing the same sort of density and styling between the side and the top which is a good Fusion of the designs and blending them and then on the back the fan cage that we saw next to the GPU Blends into this rear ventilated design so there's a lot going on here with this case and today we're going to be reviewing all of it talking about the practicality of some of the decisions they made that were a little more awkwardly placed in this and some of the better stuff before that this video is brought to you by Arctic and the liquid freezer 2 liquid coolers now including an argb model in the lineup the liquid freezer Series has been a top performer in our Benchmark for years now and Arctic has continually fine-tuned its products even post launch with things like kits for ryzen argb fans for new flare and new radiator sizes the company also has its brand new MX6 thermal paste on the market now learn more at the links in the description below so for Price this new MID Tower it's 130 dollars which puts it into the mid-range territory it doesn't come with a ton of fans for that it's got two that are equipped but obviously there's a lot of other stuff going on that is not particularly cheap for fractal to do so that's where the money's going is in all the interesting styling we've looked at there's a glass panel option that we have back here just getting caught on everything right now so that's the standard glass nothing really too special about it it's just tempered glass sheet but you'll notice that both of these are reduced with panels so these are the same size neither of them extend and cover the entire side of the case because there's this additional panel that can be separated for full access but otherwise basically just acts as a shroud with maybe some structural support not a lot of other function than that so fractal they've really been on their a game for the last couple years now actually go look at some of the other cases they have so the last couple years the main things they've put out that have been effective and some of their competitors too in our hallway of cases the fractal torrent down here this is a big one really well received in our test and we've liked it we've used it for high-end builds and I think a lot of other reviewers also liked it now their closest competition is in a little further right here so this uh White case is the Leon Lee Land call 3 and that's been a fierce competitor you can see they've got all the mechanical gimmicks on it that we showed in that review they make not used here in a negative way but that's just what it is something really does really well right now is the mechanics of a case fractal also has gotten into all this stuff where they've got other variations of the torrent uh it's cool it's kind of the same thing just smaller and other than that they've got all of these cases with a couple NZXT ones dotted in between but you can see the sort of evolution of design fractal where they discovered mesh so that was good that was a big move for fractal away from Strictly Business solid black front panel and that was it they discovered mesh and then they did a lot of mesh all of it was also uh the geometric shape they discovered which was polygons so that's fractal's Evolution let's go back to the new case the north then we're back to the north which you could see what they're doing here is different that's what they're going for is something that's not uh mesh polygons so it's good to see that fractal still trying to evolve the pitch for this case includes the words stylish sophisticated and quote inspired by Scandinavian interior design it heavily emphasizes the real wooden front panel oh sticking leather on a case or wood is nothing new we've seen plenty of examples like that like the cryovic taku the geometric feature Cowboy several wooden in-win cases years ago that never really got Mass market and lenovo's leather think Pat there was also the real Walnut veneer Atari VCS but we've rarely reviewed these things the business aesthetic doesn't usually accompany high performance which excludes a lot of our audience in this instance fractal explicitly builds the north as a quote gaming PC case so we'll judge the performance in the thermal section later on the front panel is decorated with slats of real wood it's Walnut for the black model or Oak for the white model that we have the slats are glued directly onto plastic and they use plastic as a backing and they have no bearing on structure or function they don't replace any non-wood material and they're just as much in the way as plastic would be and there is plastic there too this isn't like the q500l Eco hemp that's that's that's a real product that's its actual name by the way it's a it's a case made of cardboard they claim it decomposes we asked for one so we could bury it in the yard and test it and then they took back their offer and didn't send it so anyway back to the north so since the wood on the north is just decorative it'd actually be pretty easy relatively speaking for fractal to give other cases the north treatment so we obviously opted for the white model for our review here and this is accompanied with uh gray so it's white and gray the black model is pretty interesting too we'll put some images up of it because we don't have one but that one is accented with sort of a brass color which is really interesting as well both of them would show pretty well in footage but this gray it's more of a silvery color rather than the typical black interior chassis so it's just a different color scheme than we typically see and that Black Version has a brass accent up in the front i o as well which we don't have on this one but we do have front i o so just to show that off front i o in this case you've got standard power button of course two 3.5 so they haven't done the asinine levels of minimalism you would expect from I don't know say NZXT they actually have two ports there's two USB 3.0 which is good they're utilizing the full connection which supports do and there's a type c on there as well now working our way back to the inside of the case here so this is the access panel and to get to it we need to take this out first unfortunately most of our criticisms for this case revolve around this piece right here that I'm removing now we'll come back this in more detail as you can see it's right up against the GPU a modern 40 series would be especially problematic because you don't you really can't bend those 12 volt high power cables but even with eight pins we're right up against it so that's a problem and then it also doesn't fit there but we'll come back to that for the access panel so this front like quarter panel piece there is a thumb screw that Patrick tells me is supposed to be captive uh and when I took the panel off for the first time I noticed it is no longer captive let it be known that that happened before I got to it so I'm not sure I'm not sure what happened but apparently it's supposed to be a captain screw this thing slides back just like that so pretty clean uh unsockets and when you pull it out it reveals a pretty standard interior they've truncated the power supply shroud by cutting it back here this allows Fuller radiator support if you want to do radiator and fans in the front allows you to get all the way down to the bottom instead of having the Shroud obstructing uh the clearance there and then functionally as far as this panel goes I mean you could just put a full-length side panel on it and it'd be a little bit less uh stuff to work with and you have a normal case so if you just imagine glass or mesh all the way across that's an option we think probably what happened is maybe it's a little bit of they want to do something different and maybe it's also a little bit of manufacturing with this panel in particular because making this mesh all the way to the front thermally it could start actually causing some problems because front intake fans if they're not going through a radiator that air is going to start escaping immediately so having this here in the front will help uh direct the air straight back into the tower cooler so there's that upside but additionally it's probably some manufacturing of structural rigidity like on this uh you see they have all this support the longer you make this thing the more wobbly it's going to be as far as the fan bracket so the optional fan bracket can be mounted behind the mesh side panel with space for up to two 140 mil fans the bracket can be mounted at three possible Heights and the highest position gives extra space to the GPU while the lowest position gives extra space to the CPU Cooler we were excited to test this feature but the compatibility is so limited that we couldn't even do any extra fan tests with it total cooler height is limited to 145 millimeters at the highest position with this thing installed and because most Tower coolers are 150 plus you're mostly constrained to liquid coolers if positioned there total GPU depth including power connectors and pcie fingers is limited to 148 millimeters at the lowest position so when you have of taller video cards which is most of them these days that cable is not going to clear the bracket 148 millimeters is an extremely tight limit especially with stiff 12 volt high power connectors or liquid cooling tubes to consider many Tower coolers are incompatible with the upper position many gpus are incompatible with the lower so if you do want to use the side intake it would maybe make the most sense to put it in the highest slot with a downdraft CPU Cooler but then it's unlikely you'd want a less effective downdraft cooler in a case that's expensive and with the vertical clearance for something way better in the past we've found side intake fans to actually be one of the most effective fans you can install like in the older cases the half ax for example but they've fallen out of fashion with the rise of transparent side panels alright so for the next part we're going to unsocket our test video card and instead throw in the second most hated video card on the planet right now which is the 4080 and I'll let you guess which one is the first most hated so this thing it's the same size as a 49 DFE and we need to take out we need to take out some of these too okay so same size as a 490 as well and uh other than obviously the thickness putting it much closer to the Shroud there's still enough clearance here to not cause problems but this is pretty tight this we tested it it's doable you've got 18 centimeters of clearance from the motherboard to the panel to fit your video card in in total that includes the cables so let's just throw the glass panel on so it's a little more visible and there'll be a bit of a Bend there so it ends up looking something like this I've left the front out so we can still get in there but you can see you know it's it's doable you can you can route a 12 volt high power this isn't at a strict like a really rough Bend so it's actually pretty loose still down here at the Joint we are well past the strain relief on this cable so in terms of safety for the cable we're good and ultimately it's just up to you to make sure it's socketed all the way anyway so the key is always just making sure that's in at the at the Joint here on the connector but there's clearance so a 40 series is at least of this similar sizing you could use this as your template if you look online that'll fit it eats some of the space up here obviously in the very front so you've got that to think about but otherwise strictly for the case it's compatible okay so now we're gonna get back some of the panels so we already showed this is reinforced this means that for interior case lighting you probably want to avoid anything that's too bright or just too much Lighting in general because you will see the reinforcement as soon as you put a backlight on it Let's do an example so this is a bit of an extreme I don't think you're gonna put a studio light in your computer but uh that's what we're talking about so the the brighter your lights internally the more you're going to see this reinforcement show through that bothers you just something to be aware of but the reinforcement's good because in the standardized wobble testing you don't get any really bad Flex or wobble in this thing that's not like some of the 0.5 millimeter steel panels so this one's Pretty good overall the top panel actually continues the same design as uh the side with the access panel where it doesn't come all the way to the front you can see it cuts off here and so you've got a separate dividing piece here but the other side is a more standard full steel panel all the way across so we'll take this off because we're going to talk about Cable Management soon so for dust filters now uh no dust filter in the top this is effectively your filter that's fine we actually prefer not to have a dust filter because then you're stacking a filter with mesh and it actually ends up just kind of jamming it up the front does have a filter so there's kind of a standard filter in front of the fans and behind the wooden veneer here and then on the back we have a standard size power supply filter so it's not full case length but there's also only one spot for a fan down there which is under the power supply so that makes sense nothing special here the front panel comes off in these standard format you just pull on the bottom and that's it there's your front filter and I mean other than that uh this is this is pretty standard stuff it's just a strapped wood to the plastic so nothing really different there this is pretty fat panel though uh behind it we've got the two fans that are included and as for other fan options so the rear expansion slot covers are pretty interesting they use the same whole pattern in as the rear fan Mount so it's actually possible to attach an 80 millimeter fan directly to the slot covers we like to see case manufacturers passively add functionality because in this instance it's not the most practical place to put a fan but all fractal had to do was use some specific hole spacing and then bam extra fan mounts it's not like it really costs you anymore as a consumer either to get a couple more holes drilled into the case so the rear of the case is covered in the same hole pattern as we saw earlier and The pwm Fan Hub for example or anything was stand entered whole spacing could be mounted anywhere on the rear of the case or on top of the power supply shroud the downside is that the rear of the case is relatively delicate and it flexes easily without a GPU installed to reinforce it but that'll be solved once you build the computer The pwm Fan Hub is a simple splitter with one pwm input no discrete power input for it and four outputs and it's attached to the case with soldered standoffs so the screws don't directly interact with the PCB at all which should reduce the risk of damage as for cable management on the back side the space is adequate but it's underwhelming compared to competitors like the nzx the H5 flow or the land cool 216 and this is a trait shared with the torrent there's two centimeters across most of the tray and a small Channel at the front that's three centimeters deep and cutouts on top of the power supply shroud are partially blocked by ATX power supplies there are three possible mounts for three and a half inch drives under the power supply shroud with two trays included but they're a pain in the ass to reach behind the power supply cable clutter so this we think could have been done better fraxels made things a little bit easier by angling the thumb screws outwards but builds with more than one three and a half inch hard drive honestly just pull on in a bigger case for the rest of the fans the stock fans are mounted outside the chassis and are flush with the front panel to maximize space in the interior and this gives the GPU the maximum clearance of 355 millimeters the fans aren't RGB so there's not any downside to moving them further back to the inside of the chassis which would make the screws much easier to access the front mount is compatible with radiators up to 360 millimeters but this only applies when mounting radiators inside of the chassis a 360mm radiator won't fit on the outside we don't mean out of the front panel we just mean outside the chassis and inside the panel the front mount is still the best option for liquid cooling as the top mount only supports up to 240 mil radiators an installing a radiator at the top would overlap with the motherboard anyway and it would limit component clearance to a maximum of 35 millimeters Okay so so all that said time to get into some thermal and noise benchmarks for this fractals product page actually has a line they say quote get a head start on your build with the two included 140 mil aspect fans which clearly implies that they think you're going to add some fans the aspects are rated for 1700 RPM when we tested hours they were running at a standard 16 30 1670 so it's within that 10 range that fans are expected to operate in so that's fine they should do well enough without any additional help we wanted to mount fans to this thing but as we said it is not compatible in any configuration with our test bench and we think this is going to be the case for a lot of you as well the only way this would most commonly be compatible would be with an AIO or CLC a liquid cooler on top of the CPU the problem is putting fans over a liquid cooler doesn't really help they can't hit the CPU you've got no fins to cool off so it's mostly calling the vrm components and in most modern builds they just don't need it it's not really beneficial it's it's not going to be any different than putting a fan in the back of the case so that was disappointing we couldn't really do anything with it and we don't think most people will be able to either but you know if you've got a build with a shorter video card cool it's something for you to use but not in our testing let's get into the charts the first chart is just some fractal cases the CPU averaged 45 degrees Celsius above ambient with a combined CPU and GPU workload which dropped to 43 degrees with the removal and front panel these are high static pressure fans behind a lightweight mesh so the front panel isn't much of an obstacle to airflow even with the fans jammed up against the surface and the front panel removal it helps us as a task to search for poor pressure this is something that fractal avoided though and it's a positive for their case design swapping the mesh panel for a glass one resulted in no meaningful change whatsoever from the original 45 degree average which isn't as unusual as it might seem because all the active airflow is front to back and without side intake fans which we can't fit anyway okay the side mesh doesn't have much to do with CPU thermals here now that said we want to remind everyone that thermal testing for cases is heavily dependent on the parts chosen so it's one of the most variable tasks of any product testing we conduct as such it's fully possible that other configurations would benefit or even be hindered by this mesh panel for example you could have air escaping before it hits the components or likewise you could have air entering through the side if there's say a negative pressure layout comparatively with other cases 45 degrees is great performance relative to the rest of the chart it's tied with cases like the land coil 2 mesh and the nearly open air in-win Air Force the torrent is still fractal's best performer it's made at 41 degrees over ambient but the north compares favorably against frackle's own similarly priced mesh52 compact which averaged 47 degrees the most similar offering from fractal's usual rival NZXT is the H5 flow but the north is even further ahead of its 54 degree average here family is land call 216 keeps its position at the top of the chart and as a high performance budget case it'll stay there relatively uncontastic the north has a different Market it's more looks focused even though they're kind of close in price there's a big enough Gap that both of them can exist in their own segment rendering our usual blender monkey head scene on the CPU brought the average up to a less extreme 36 degrees Celsius above ambient which ties the H5 flow in the absence of GPU heat as well as the mesh fights you compact the Lancel 216 maintains its lead at 33 degrees though our standardized fan test allows us to judge case airflow independently from stock fans by using the same set of noctua fans in each case there's two 140 mil intake fans and one 120 mil exhaust in the instance of the fractal North that may not be an improvement over the stock setup because the two stock 140 mil intake fans are unusually high RPM swapping to the standardized kit did improve CPU average temperature just outside of variance with a new average of 44 degrees Celsius over ambient fractals stock fans here have improved immensely since the days of the original meshify sea predictably running the aspect 140 is at their maximum speed or close to 1700 RPM made the north one of the loudest cases we've measured Landing it right behind the torrent at 49.9 DBA getting them down to our 36 debate noise normalized threshold required reducing the speed to 50 percent but when we were testing this case if you run these fans from non-pwm headers then the tax signal dropped once they were below 50 percent this didn't affect the functionality and it didn't happen when using the pwm headers as you should use but we haven't seen this behavior before at just 50 speed that's too high for this kind of fall off typically we were able to verify speeds though with an external attack and again you can just use pwm and you should at the reduced fan speeds though the CPU averaged 48 degrees above ambient up from the original 45 degree average which makes sense because they're quieter now and there's a similar increase in GPU thermals that CPU average puts the north within error of the fractal meshify to compact at 49 degrees and far ahead of the nzxe H5 flows 56 degree average but once again the 216 remains at the top of the chart working on this case has mostly made us wonder where the hell inwin has been it's been a long time since in-win has produced uh like really mainstream wildly popular cases they still make stuff but they were trying to do this wood thin I think before pretty much anyone else I remember covering it at a trade show a year like probably four or five years ago and it was wildly popular but it just seemed to fall flat so this is like the perfect in-win style case but they're not here fractal is so um fraxel this point they are competing right now mostly with NZXT nzxt's flow series seems to have taken that spot as the competitor in this price class where in when probably should be with something other than an 805. so the north as a case we think the north is a competent compact mid tower that at its core feels like it should typically fall in the 90 to 110 dollar price range right alongside the H5 flow however its unique appearance and its stock fans elevate it and make the 130 MSRP palatable they're a better price to Performance options out there for those who don't care about the oak or the walnut look notably the land call 216 if you only care about performance to price but the north is a slam dunk alternative to fractal's own mesh by 2 compact at approximately the same price performance and size the Norris mesh side panel also has the potential to add a lot of airflow but only if side mounted fans are installed which is tricky with limited space and compatibility so we're impressed with how the north has managed to combine some business-like aesthetic like fractal's older style with performance they've done it in a way that you know a lot of times when they start trying to combine business and performance it just comes across as incredibly pretentious to the performance audience and kind of weird to the business audience so I think fractal has found a good balance here and uh Patrick and I are working on this case both think this one is well worth the consideration and it's price class it's like we said it's about 20 30 bucks more expensive than a strict No Frills competitor would be but it has Frills so there's your 20 or 30 dollars that's it for this one thanks for watching as always go to steward.com net to grab a shirt like this one or patreon.com Gamers and access to help us out directly and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 509,933

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, fractal north, cases, best pc cases, fractal north case review, fractal north case benchmarks, fractal north vs lancool 216, best cases 2023, fractal north vs torrent

Id: Aor-3v6N7i8

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/SireEvalish]

It seems like Fractal has been on a bit of a hot streak in regards to cases. Torrent, Meshify 2, and North are all winners. I just picked up a Torrent myself and it’s a phenomenal case.

[u/Roseking]

I don't know if Fractal did a paper launch or just severely underestimated how many people would be interested in this case, but it has been pretty much out of stock since launch (at least in the US).

I am torn between the torrent for slightly better performance and this for the looks and being slightly cheaper. But I have yet to see it in stock.

[u/MisinformationALWAYS]

I dunno why case reviewers focus so much on CPU temps when testing these cases. We have monster GPU's drawing 350w+ that are far more sensitive to temperature and will drop boost bins and lose performance as they approach temp limits where as every CPU to date up until Ryzen 7000 series will truck on at 90C all day with no consequence.

Also please for the love of god ditch that super low TDP GPU that you guys have been clinging to for the sake of maintaining a comparative database and start fresh with something high TDP that better illustrates the differences in airflow between cases (its what you should have started with so this change wouldn't be necessary years later). Users with high end cards have no clue how they will perform in these cases because your results don't really translate from such a low end card where as if you tested with something higher end, everyone with a GPU equivalent or lower in TDP is covered.

[u/lovely_sombrero]

I really wish that more companies included holders for extra GPU fans. It isn't really a good idea for this smaller case, but in a bigger case with more clearence that would be awesome. Aftermarket versions (like this or this) aren't really the same, since they are cheap and flimsy and not specifically designed for the case, without clearance for a 3+ slot vertically mounted GPU. Or a similar bracket that goes into the PCI slot below the card if the GPU is normally mounted directly to the motherboard. I have two extra side-mounted 120mm fans in my Fractal Torrent (vertically mounted GPU) and the GPU is much cooler. The GPU fans can run about 20% slower than without the extra fans and the extra fans are completely silent.

I can run a lot of less demanding games without the GPU fan ever turning on, before that the fans kept turning on every ~5 minutes when the GPU reached 50C. I hope more case manufacturers look into this!

[u/-Venser-]

Wouldn't those side vents be better with vertical GPU orientation?

[u/TheCookieButter]

Still rocking my Define R5 because I love the space to work in and simple design, no worries about RGB, it does its disco inside the case and I can't see it.

I've toyed with the idea of a new case but don't think I'll bother until I change my 5800x and b450 to something with more USB-C. I'll definitely be looking at Fractal again, digging the wood designs and they'll even match my speakers.

[u/EmilMR]

I was considering it but it's too small for new cards. Pretty much only the FE fits as he demonstrated it. All the other cards are wider.

New cases gotta get wider.

[u/Spectrum_Prez]

I usually like GN's reviews, but I'm seriously disappointed they didn't test out the side fans with a smaller GPU. I have a pet theory that a GPU exhaust fan might work even better than an intake fan, and was quietly hoping someone would test that out.

[u/Aleblanco1987]

I'd love to se an itx versión with a different config than the ridge (similar to ncase, cougar qbx, etc)