Fractal Mood - This case is hiding in plain sight!

it's not a speaker or an air purifier it's not a gigantic smart home device I assure you there's a PC build inside this [Music] enclosure welcome to machines and more so I am back from computex I had to jump right back into this one so I haven't gotten a good break yet but you know it's all good fractal mood fractal unveiled it at space 88 in typ a 10 I hope you were able to check out that preview with me and uh it was a fitting atmosphere to announce this vertical Tower a little bit smaller Tower than type 101 but nonetheless still very much uh proportioned like a skyscraper so in this review I'm going to cover the features of this case I'll show you some component and uh cooling setup recommendations we'll see where this case Stacks up in the overall uh smaller case spectrum and what you can expect if you're building in it take a look at the performance and finally I will share what I think about this case overall and some pointers to uh look out for as you decide real quick before we begin full disclosure this video is not sponsored by fractal I did receive the case from them free of charge for the purpose of review and feedback however my testing and evaluation is completely independent and they're going to see the review findings at the same time this goes live to the public if you enjoy content like this please go ahead make sure you are subscribed to the channel helps tremendously and a big thank you in advance so I'm in a good mood now that I can show you the fractal mood and it is officially launching today this is our unique uh 20.4 L vertical orientation case that features this fabric upholstery the cross-section or the footprint of the case it's a square right it's a square 212x 212 mm and it is 453 mm tall so there is this and I'll turn this this way so that you can see a little bit better but uh there's a removal panel at the back here in front of the vertically oriented uh graphics card so this actually locks the shell in place so that uh you can then lift off I've got my lights up here so make sure I don't tip it over ah just just enough to clear there but that's how you take off the shell and with that shell removed you reveal the uh steel framed internal structure there are two screws here that can be used optionally to give it more security that way if you just remove the rear panel it doesn't just come off but you know for home use you probably don't need those screws on this assembly is where your mini ITX motherboard will Mount uh with the rear IO facing down so if you kind of tip it over here this way that's where the rear IO is right so adjacent to the board over here is where your sfx or sfx L power supply can mount and then a riser cable inserted to the expansion slot of the motherboard will connect to the graphics card which is going to be uh pointed with its fans towards the back on the rear side of the case the I/O is also pointed down here for the graphics card you can have a Max of 325 mm of length and 158 mm of width that includes any room you would need for the power connection or the cables and 56 mm in inclusive of the back plate the case is going to come by default with a 3 and 1/2 in HDD tray that's mounted on the radiator panel and that can be just unscrewed if you don't need it I think most of you were going to take this off and then that way you don't uh take up a space for a fan or your cooler fan uh two 2 and 1/2 in drives are supported the only no compromise one it's going to mount at the side here and there's even a little clip for it sorry get to the right side here H it's going to be right here and then we'll just hop this in like that and that's where your drive is going to mount and that's the only one that comes without any compromise because to do the second one which they also provide a tray for uh that's this guy here it's going to require you to take off this big 180 MIM fan and I think that's going to be too much of a compromise for most folks because this fan is integral to the case's overall design so you don't don't really want to sacrifice that in a way you have a sandwich sty layout uh but turned vertical and then there's this fan SL radiator section that's parallel to the face of the motherboard on this bracket which can pivot out you can mount up to 2 140 mm fans or up to a 280 mm radiator fractal recommends a 240 and I would definitely agree with that at B B on the geometry of how things are fitting together in here at the top you have this large 180 mm fan it's a very big exhaust fan and it's pre-mounted ready to go as an exhaust and I don't think you should change that this just it it should only be exhausting uh the airfow configuration is a chimney style because it's going to intake it's going to intake from all four sides of the case and exhaust out the top so it's it's optimal to unscrew and then pivot out this rat and and fan panel cuz this is to give you the most access to the front of the case so that's how you would access the face of the board and actually with this panel removed it's it's really easy because you have top and bottom as well to access everything so you can choose to install your cooler Hardware first but you don't necessarily need to because it's easy to access here and then connect up the cables to your motherboard you don't necessarily need to have the power supply installed yet if it's a modular one just go ahead and you know back channel the cable to it later on when you have that mounted in for front pen iio in this case you have two USB 3 3.0 a ports One USB 3.2 2x2 C Port one combo audio jack and the LED illuminated power button these IO cables can be plugged in at this stage the way the board is positioned you have easy access to all sides so you can manage up the cables all in a streamlined way and then take advantage of these straps that fractal provides power supply mounts to the cage a adjacent to the board you can choose fan facing either side I don't think it's going to matter too much and just plug in the extension cable for the uh AC power at at this stage you can install either the graphics card or the cooler it won't matter too much because the card lives in its own compartment here and so so you could have done this as the first step of the build if you wanted to or left it to the very end it does not really matter too much um for this case review I built up with two different cards this first one is the 6800 XT gaming OC it's it's practically a three slot thick card that fits in this case is technically outside the spec so I'm using this card simply for consistent comparison against some other cases but I think you will want to stick to a thinner card for airflow purposes now doesn't have to be one of the you know new sff ready Enthusiast uh cards on that list but I think with this side panel first off you're going to cause turbulent noise with the punch outs here if you're too close and also you won't draw enough a if you use the dust filter when you're right up against it so something like the founders Edition 4070 here it's going to be much more suitable for this case and I will show you the you know results with this cart and the build when we discuss air cooling let's talk liquid cooled build first if you are installing an eio I would dry fit up first so don't hook up your fan cables yet and don't put any thermal paste yet all you're going to do is see how to run your aio's tubing fractal's recommendation is to actually have the radiator bar exit over the motherboard side and then you kind of choose the side that you want your CPU blocks uh fittings to be on whether it's the Ram side or the rear iio side um but I actually had what I felt was a pretty good run with my 240 and the uh tubing the barbs on the radiator exiting on on this end like that over the power supply so it's it's it's going to vary uh part of the difficulty with having the barbs exit the motherboard and is managing the excess tubing and you just have less run here and I found that with my 240 and having the rad Barb slotting into this Gap over here uh over the power supply and then snaking the tubing down and then under the board to connect to the blocks with the finings on the Ram side here was a pretty reasonable run the optimal configuration for you will depend on the geometry of the particular unit you're running and it's possible there's only one good way for your unit to fit so that's why I would recommend doing the dry fit first and then decide on your orientation before pasting it and installing it for good ignore the fact that my rad fans are exhausting here this was just the last configuration I test when I was kind of uh playing around with it but I would install them as intakes uh intakes from the side panel and then chimney airflow out the top right this way the rad pretty much takes care of itself and the GPU takes care of itself and you avoid the thermal interference from one component on the other in a combined scenario once you are mounted up to the board then you can either uh Mount the rad plate to the radiator and then screw the plate down to the assembly or you can just position the rad put the bracket in and then screw the radiator to the bracket which I found a little bit easier for the first go uh Cable Management uh on the side here that you see these little hooks here it can be also used for managing the AO tubing if you need and a full Suite of cable management ties and zip ties are provided by fractal for your convenience quick note on cooler compatibility namely the thickness of your radiator and your fans the limiting factor can either be the height of your CPU block or your power supply my unit that I'm using here the test unit is The Cooler Master Atmos and this block measures in at 53 mm tall I'm running these nocto NFA 12s uh by A2 X 25s on the 27 mm radiator and this comes out to about 53 1 12 mm in total thickness this block is fairly really close to the fan here and this is a 53 mm block I only have 9 mm left so even if you have a lower CPU block though then the power supply is going to limit your thickness between the power supply and my fans I have 15 mm left so based on my measurements the absolute ceiling would be 68 mm of radiator plus fans due to the power supply limitation and then over the motherboard you have 115 mm of height for your block height plus Rad plus fans but just know that this Max will yield no airflow or next to none and also keep in mind the closer that you get to the max the more difficult it is to manage your tubing so if you do intend on running an AO I think you will want to stick to a 240 with a sub 30 mm radiator like I have here and then standard thickness 25 mm fans and a CPU block that's less than 55 mm uh you have plenty of units like that on the market the ones you do really want to avoid are the ones with tall CPU blocks or the Arctic liquid freezer type of thick RADS which I think the liquid freezer if I remember cly has a thick block too so that really doesn't work well here uh 280 can technically fit uh but I have concerns on how you would run the tubing and I think with too thick a unit the tubing management will also be the limiting factor hence the 240 recommendation here uh with all that being said I think you will want to give some serious thought as to whether you really want to run an AO in this case as I did find it a significant issue here with AO thermal performance so I am testing here with a 7900x for consistency against some other test cases here this 7900x is absolutely too much CPU for this case but let me show you specifically why so normally I run the CPU only testing with the 7900x at 5.4 GHz and 1.25 Volts for the allcore CPU render which results on a PPT of about 177 watts and I could not hold that in this case it went up well above 95° very quickly and I had to abort down clocking down volting to 1.2 volts did that helped so I stopped testing with manual locked clocks and instead just ran the CPU and PBO to see what kind of boost clocks I would get up the fans to full speed on the nocuous and the results still weren't good in fact it hit the 95 degree level very quickly and then started to downclock so at the end of the testing I was only getting 4930 MHz on average across all cores the CPU is only pulling about 145 Watts at this point which is really really poor when you compare it to some other uh smaller peers running a similar setup of course these others were tested with two fantex t30s at500 RPM and too tight to run those uh reasonably in this case but at full speed the nocta at 2,000 rpm should be easily beating those and that's clearly not the case here so we are down about 200 MHz versus what we should be getting with a 240 so why is that well first off there is a limited amount of air flow on the exit side of the Rat but if we take off the shell and just run it on Open we actually get what we'd expect so it's actually this guy the fabric shell that's too restrictive to airf flow then when you have the radiator right up against it you're actually forcing the rad and fan to be only able to draw air from the you know this 240x 120 mm rectangle here one thing I tried was offsetting it a little bit inwards with some standoffs to expand the intake footprint but it was only a tiny little bit better and uh the of course pushes the radiator and the fans even more close to the uh board and the power supply so there's only so much you can do if you if you want to try that but uh flipping the fans to exhaust like you know the last configuration I had tried here doesn't really help since you're just restricting the air flow out outwards and in fact since you are now fting the primary airflow direction of the case the results are even worse in a gaming scenario the setup can be serviceable GPU temps are fairly decent in this case again not the recom thickness of card for this case but just for the initial comparison the temps they are in line with cases that I would consider having good GPU temps one thing you probably have to do if your card happens to be too thick and too close to the mesh panel is to go ahead and remove uh the dust filter here and it's really easy to do that you just kind of slide it out they've made it very easy to just kind of remove that um the reason I did that was because the turbulent noise was unbearable and that would be my primary concern if you're running a too big card for this case the CPU attempts are still elevated compared to its peers and it's not because uh the GPU is having an impact on the radiator because these are intaking but it's more so the airf Flow Restriction from the fabric screen and as mentioned the intaking radiator fans would be the preferred fan configuration and there is a really a marginal benefit for GPU thermos when you exhaust uh but it's too much of a penalty for your CPU temps to be worth considering it so liquid cooling the CPU while absolutely supported in this case I don't think it's as optimal a choice let's talk about a configuration that I feel is a bit more reasonable in this case so for air Cooling in this case the official maximum spec is a 110 mm and then you could run some small Tower coolers you actually have a little more at 115 mm that I measured but my preference wouldn't be to run a tower cooler here I want to run a setup that syns up a little bit better with the airflow configuration of the case and that would be to do a bigger top down cooler in conjunction with intaking case fans on the panel so I want to take advantage of the uh sort of a bigger surface area to draw air into the case from here so we'll just do two 140 mm fans these are arctic's new p14 Max uh which I will be reviewing I had to run these at like 15% cuz there is so fast otherwise uh about 800 RPM for the testing here this is noct l12 as77 which I covered last month on the channel so I do have that paired with a 25mm fan and this type of setup would work well with a CPU like the 7800 x3d so that's what I'm using here so on the GPU side as mentioned earlier I would tend to recommend something closer to two slots such as this 4070 Fe card it doesn't have to be an Fe card all we're trying to do is just not run a card that's too thick and hug the outer panel too tightly comparing as another case with the same setup I tested happens to be the fractal Tera the smaller sibling of the mood with this setup we are getting acceptable thermals they're not great uh for the CPU Only scenar The Thermals and consequent boost clocks do Trail the Tera slightly got a 60 mahz Gap here uh with the help of the 240 mm plus the big top exhaust I feel like the performance should be better and it's not as good as I would Envision so not bad but uh comparing to a shell Less open case for the same test you're actually losing quite a bit of performance here uh although it's not quite as significant a loss as with the AO for 144p gaming also adding in a similar vertical orientation case in the ncore 100 Max which uses a custom 120 mm EO the CPU comparison here it's apples to oranges so don't take too much stock in that but uh I did want to include this case because it has similar it had a similar GPU setup that I tested and uh just looking at the GPU temps we are getting slightly better GPU temps from the encor 100 here the Tera CPU temps are significantly better much better than in the CPU only scenario and with this setup somehow we're just getting a little bit more influence on the cpu's cooling but with better GPU temps finally throwing in the open shell or throwing away the shell it gives us an idea of where the uh deficit is coming from so the GPU while it's not covered by the fabric you don't see very much of a difference there so the uh the panel that they that fractal designed over the GPU is not terribly restrictive but the CPU temps in fact in a setup like this it could be quite incredible were it not for the restrictive fabric shell here let's take a quick listen to some Acoustics I did want to share the Sonic impact with the radiator fans and the impact of the shell and then also just to illustrate why you will want to stick to a GPU that can give you some margin between the uh cooler and the uh panel not a noticeable impact on the sound from the dust filter all right so performance- wise the air cooled build it's it's not terrible though you are still throwing some performance away and I believe this would still be The Sweet Spot component wise for the mood so an air cooled gaming build such as the 7600 a or 7800 X 3D for the CPU and pair with a 4070 or 4070 super I really would not go too hot a CPU in this case uh that being said as you've seen you can already get some quite good results with a case that's almost half its size in the fractal Tera which is also I think a very good-looking case a lot of the volume of this case is dedicated to enabling liquid cooling so if you aren't able to effectively use it some of that volume is a bit and I don't want to say wasted but it's not an efficient use of the volume rent and I think many of you can be very happy with a smaller sandwich style case like the Tera or the T1 V2 and because these still occupy a small footprint as well so then why would you get the mood right because I think first St this is actually trying to Target a different Niche and where this is unique is that it provides for more Incognito home decor integrated PC build because this could easily be mistaken for a speaker or smart home type of device and that might just be exactly what you're looking for because not everyone wants to display an obvious PC case on their media cabinet so while this is maybe a very specific niche in the realm of PC cases there's actually very little else quite like this and it's a very intuitive strategy from fractal as well so I personally think the tarot looks great it's gorgeous as an htpc build but it is unmistakably a PC case and this uh for this guy here the perhaps the only thing that gives it away is uh you know the front panel iio assuming it had the fabric shell over it so this will be the first case I'm reviewing with my new standardized rating Matrix which I'll discuss in a dedicated uh video soon but let's just compare how I would rate this one versus something like cooler Masters n Core 100 Max similar form factor which uh that one is not a standalone case but we can still cross compare here for reference for user experience elements this one comes in slightly higher the difference being the quality of fractal documentation which I think is extremely clear and and it's excellent um on the case design and quality the ncor 100 I would rate that slightly ahead finish quality is good here the plastic here is not cheap type of plastic but I think most would agree that the aluminum panels with the Striking cutouts does put the incore 100 Max slly had in terms of the material quality and appearance but you know make no mistake perhaps the more subdued look here it could be exactly what you're going for the compatibility is where the mood scores a lot of wins you got fans air cooler capability there's a lot going for this one but there is one critical difference to be aware of because the ncore 100 Max does have better GPU compatibility you can take a three slot card finally for performance the mood does fall behind slightly here and while the air cooled performance was okay still not as good as it should be and the deficiency in the liquid cooled CPU performance really does take it down uh in this category here pricing for the mood is $150 US and and based on the math I've done previously on the ncor 100 Max bundle I think both cases on are on par of course with the mood you're not being made to buy a bundled in cooling solution or bundled in power spy here and you have the freedom to choose components compared to a fuller spectrum of smaller PC cases that I have reviewed and tested I'd say the mood is slightly ahead of the middle of the pack but only just overall I think the case serves its purpose well maybe this is a htpc or living room gaming system it's very neutral gives off a very calming mood and uh where I'd like to see some improvement it's really just two things there's a lot of volume dedicated to it so can we make the cooling a bit more effective right you got space for fans you got space for radiator the fabric while it's function as clear and and effective as a Decor element it's far too restrictive so easy solution here can you find a less restrictive material because the GPU hides in the back and the more typical PC type of dust filter that was used there did not significantly inhibit the performance and that level air flow I think would be more suitable and more acceptable for a radiator now I don't think it would make sense to put another one of those uh panels at the front because I think it would stick out like a Sor them and ruin the aesthetic but a fabric with a less tight weave could be a possible starting point so do be aware this is a vertical case with some innate inconveniences to accessing the motherboard ports and the display cable ports cuz they're all under here right uh fractal has designed it so that you don't necessarily need 90° cables for the most part how about you will need to tip it over anytime you need to access those ports like I've shown you here and so my second recommendation here is given the niche here the only thing that really gives us away as a PC case is this front panel I/O so why not place this at the back right given the inconveniences with accessing the motherboard ports just due to this one being a vertical style case I would typically reach for the USB ports on the front panel out of convenience but if you have a bunch of stuff that's plugged into the front can of defeat meets the purpose of the aesthetic and the target market here so now I don't want to use these and if you had relocated those to the back the ports would still be just as serviceable right and and now they're going to be used without being seen so the the power button doesn't necessarily need to move but in a case like this you know it's actually where I would not mind having to reach behind to turn on because if you have it on the media cabin or something like that you're going to have to walk over there and turn it on anyway so I don't think reaching behind you know to turn this system on would be a big deal and with all this stuff hidden away the disguise is absolute right uh one additional point just to be aware of is with the intaking air flow you're really going to get a lot of dust on this fabric material over time now I know the uh it's restrictive for airf flow but it does still intake and that's really going to stick to the front so just be aware uh would that would make this even more restrictive if it's clogged right so keep up on the cleaning not difficult you clean it with a fabric roller simply just take the shell off and then blow it off um outside or something like that so nothing quite like this mood in terms of the neutral looks and integrated feel if you're aware of the limitations and you build accordingly and the slightly larger volume is fine then I think this will always put you in a good mood so black or gray gray is what I gave a preview on earlier both are very nice looking neutral colors launches today go check it out so that'll do it for this review I hope you found it helpful if so please give a like please make sure you're subscribed I'll be leaving links down below for the case and the component so please use those if you are getting the case or just shopping big thanks for watching today [Music]

Channel: Machines & More

Views: 10,447

Keywords: noctua u12s, amd ryzen, ryzen, mini-itx, small form factor, SFF, computer building, computer, custom build, noctua, amd 5700xt, radeon 5700xt, evga sfx gm, mitx case, chromax, noctua u12a, Ryzen 7, 3700x, ryzen 3700x, CM NR200P, NR200, CoolerMaster NR200, Coolermaster NR200P, NCASE M1, Cooler Master NR200, NR200P, AIO Cooling, Water Cooling, Noctua L12S, Air Cooling, Gaming PC, SFF case, Nvidia 3080, nvida 3080, nvdia 3080, 3070, nvidia 3090, 3090 GPU, 3080 gpu

Id: J3A88Eg2R00

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024