Fractal Puts Everyone to Shame: Fire Hazard Fix Tested (Torrent Case)

fractal recently launched its torrent case which did really well on our review but it had an immediate problem which was this this is the fan hub fractal had an issue much like nzxt's with the h1 where the early fan hub had a short circuit risk which facts all the time described to us as a hazard and it's email and we would agree because short circuits are what causes fires and things like the nzxt h1 fraxel took a lot of steps to remedy this issue it's it's almost like they saw what happened to ndxt and gigabyte uh and then decided to not have a product that could catch on fire and so they tried to start fixing it and now we have the updated version of the fan hub we're going to look at the old one and show you what the problem was now that we understand it we'll look at the new one we'll go over the changes and we even have the pcb design file from fractal they're very open to this whole process and wanted to walk us through all the changes that they were making and all the research they were doing to try and diagnose the problem so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so we'll start here this is the old fan hub this came in from a viewer and it has some of the damage that fractal was talking about on it so we we had this shipped to us so we could try and diagnose it the unit we had in our review was not damaged it didn't have any issues so that's why we reached out to the community and we were able to source one that did we have two new ones here this is an engineering sample from fractal they sent us to this earlier on and then we decided to wait to do anything with the video until they had the production ready sample which is this one so they are visually different and we'll talk about that today they are also in a sense functionally different although they are intended to do the same thing in the case but let's talk about how fractal handled the issue to begin with so fractal as a reminder we already talked about this in a separate video not going to go through the whole thing here i will link it below if you care but fractal reached out to us before we ever became aware of the issue the issue again to be very clear is that there is potential if uh especially during assembly at the factory there's a scratch on the surface of the pcb or something there's potential for a short of 12 volts to ground and a short of 12 volts to ground with ground here would be the case via the screw going through the screw hole so it's basically exactly the nzx the h1 issue the nzx th1 as you might remember spectacularly caught fire in our testing and fractal being aware of this and maybe also having morals and ethics although not required to do a fix maybe decided to get ahead of things so they reached out to us very early we did the news video about it and talked about how fractal did a formal uh recall through all of its retailers their customers everyone i could get in touch with so fractal i think pulled back something like 487 cases something like that and worked on replacing the fan hubs themselves rather than waiting for them to sell to the end user and then shipping the replacement to the end user if they can ever find them so this is the right move is to pull it back themselves fix it themselves and now it's ready to start shipping things again with the update so that's what we're looking at that's kind of the recap of what happened and if you want the new fan hub and you happen to get the torrent although i don't think many people did because of how quickly fractal reacted then we'll have some links below for how you can get the new fan hub so let's start by identifying the problem the problem is it's right there that piece of copper there that exposed part of the power plane that's the problem because when you put a screw through this hole and the top of the screw contacts that and the rest of the screw contacts the case back here somewhere that's your short so that is the issue that can cause a fire fractal of course pointed out that in theory your power supply should protect you from this with short-circuit protection but you can still have long-term issues if users ignore it and keep trying to turn it on that's a problem if you have a bad power supply that's a problem so the right move was to fix this regardless of what protections should do because the the goal is to not use them rather than hope they work so the issue is the pcb gets mounted to the side of the chassis we'll show some footage of the how it actually installs at some point but it mounts something like this and when factory workers are installing it because it can be misaligned there's an issue where inserting a screw with a drill especially if the pcb is already scratched can result in this issue even if you as the end user never take this out never work and never modify it so this can happen out of the factory that's point number one as of august 31st fractal detected eight failures out of 479 that had checked at the time is replacing all of them the through holes in this if you look at these are also much like the ndxt ones where this one might be an easier example to see they are drilled through without any it's not a plated through hole there's no plating in there and it's just drilled straight through whereas if you look at the new one big difference a nicely plated through hole there's actually a lot more clearance as well between the hole here for the screw and the connectors for the fan where this was a concern we had with this one where as you potentially scratch or wear away the surface here you are getting awfully close to an actual active fan header so to recap the main things with the old design it's a two-sided pcb one layer is conductive on each side the entire front side except for the isolated pwm traces is a 12 volt plane the entire rear side except for the isolated tachometer traces is a ground plane that's not a problem the through holes are drilled directly through the 12 volt plane without any clearance if the protective lacquer coating is damaged around those screw holes the 12-volt plane shorts into the case or ground as we described and this would most likely trigger those power supply protections but again as fractal said in its email quote this can lead to issues that are harder to detect including slowly melting cable insulation so here's the new ones from what we can tell these should be the same we looked at them both and they appear to be identical technically this one was from engineering so we're going to set this one aside because uh technically that was before they started shipping these replacements so the new one uh the differences are mostly obvious but there's a bit of a height difference about 1.5 millimeter increase in pcb height and that allows it to gain that extra space we talked about between the screw heads and the nearby soldering points the screw heads were originally very close to the connector so the pcb is now on this new one 23.5 millimeters top to bottom to give more space so that's the main difference there in terms of sizing it'll still fit the same thing on the torrent you don't need like a new case or anything like that it's just this this part changes there's a version number now that makes it easy to identify which ones are good and which ones are bad the plated through holes should be pretty obvious also but if yours says v 1.1 then as far as we understand it right now you're good you got the new one and this is fine to be very clear it seems to work well on our testing so we haven't had any issues with it and the old one was a problem for changes for the new one from what fractal was telling us plus some of our own notes here vcc or the voltage common collector the rpm and the pwm main traces are now all on the back side of the pcb the vcc traces are still wide enough fractal sets for three amps total there's a reason it says this we'll talk about that and as for the reason of moving it all to the backside this is to protect it from screws and from assembly line error as for that 3 amp total statement that's because the 12 volt connection has been reduced from an entire side of the pcb down to a single but thick trace the front side of the pcb contains small bridges for pwm and rpm to carry them over the vcc trays the bridges between the front and the back are visible as small pinholes on the pcb so that walks you through the differences for the most part between new and old at this point we're going to hand it off to patrick he'll get the multimeter out do some quick testing on showing well continuity and where a short is possible or hopefully where it's not possible on the new one and that'll pretty much wrap up if fractal has resolved things fully on its new fan hubs okay so let's talk about a few of the changes that have been made to the pcb starting with the plated through holes fractal has done this for protection rather than grounding you might want to plate a through hole in order to get a connection to ground but they have specifically avoided if you zoom in really close any connection to the ground plane here around the plated through hole you can see there's actually a gap between this plane and the plating here they've done that to according to them and i quote avoid the possibility of current traveling through the case if ground wire is disconnected so they just want to avoid any possibility of current traveling through here at all so this is just reinforcement fractal has also widened these holes versus the original design and the reason that they've done that is that in the torrent this hub is partially obscured by a piece of steel so in the factory when they're assembling this the workers have to get an electric screwdriver with a screw on it and insert it through the steel side of the case into this hole and if this isn't aligned perfectly they can end up jabbing a spinning screw into this lacquer coating here and chipping it and that's what leads to these scratches like this that short end of the case so reinforcing the hole is part of solving that but widening the hole means that they can have standoffs in the case that have little collars on them so that when the workers are assembling this this will align onto the collar perfectly and they'll be able to insert the screw perfectly without looking at it this issue didn't occur in fractals uh older cases that had fan hubs on them because as you can see this is the uh this is the nexus plus two they made a typo one this one had to sharpie it out this is a pre-production but they have standoffs soldered to the pcb itself so when they are assembling a case like the meshify 2 all the workers have to do is take this pcb with the standoffs already soldered to it put it in the case and then put the screws into the standoffs so the screws never touch the pcb and there's never any risk of them chipping the lacquer because standoffs are already aligned but the major difference is that on the front this holding is a ground plane whereas on this it's a 12 volt power plane one other thing they've done you'll notice that on the older hub this is the connection that would go to a motherboard and we've got labels for the this is a four pin fan connector so starting from pen one we have ground 12 volt rpm and then pwm so you can see on the new hub the only pens that they have marked are pwm and rpm that's the control signal and the tachometer signal back from the fan and the reason that they only have those two hooked up is that they don't want somebody to be able to plug in this uh motherboard header incorrectly and potentially send 12 volts to the wrong place so they're just narrowing down the amount of incorrect connections that can be made here now because the pins that would be ground and 12 volt here are not connected on the new one that means that you can't power this hub via the motherboard connector but you wouldn't really want to do that anyway that's what the sata connections are for so this new hub requires the sata connection for power we have this hub that was sent to us by a viewer with a nice scratch on the front here so if i put a probe on this scratch i can for example go to the sata connection here and touch the 12 volt line and get connection i can go to the motherboard connection here get connection to 12 volts and i can go to these fans pen one is ground pin 2 is 12 volts so for each of these fans i can get connection to 12 volts and just to be clear none of the ground pins i'm touching ground pins now none of those have continuity this whole surface this is all 12 volts under here and if any of this lacquer gets scratched then it will make a connection 12 volts and that's it's just that easy like you can do it with a screw pretty easily on the back of the pcb here this is all a ground plane so if i make a scratch anywhere on here then i should be able to get this pin right here would be a connection to ground so yeah this whole side is ground we have our new pcb here this is the engineering sample it's identical to the final product but i can for example uh let me touch 12 volts here and if i scratch right here there's no connection and if i touch the ground pin now you can see that the front is a ground plane now now if i go over to this motherboard connection if i touch this ground pin you can see it's not connected so this ground pin isn't connected to anything at all and if i touch this 12 volt pen this also isn't connected here it's not connected to 12 volts it's not connected to the ground it's not connected to anything and ground not connected anything so these two pins are just support now you can also see that this whole rear it was a ground plane on the old one and it should still be on the new one yeah so this is all ground but these plated through holes these are not connected to the ground and they're not connected to 12 volt and they're not connected to anything on the fans so this is a very simple fan hub control from the motherboard and power from sata connector it looks like everything's working as intended now and it's safer than it used to be so i'll send it back to steve uh to close out the video back to you steve so last couple things to talk about here is just how fractal handled this in general fractal did about as good of a job as you can in the gigabyte piece when we did one of our follow-ups one of the things we said was that every company that makes a product has a very high chance that at some point it's going to make a mistake and how they handle that is really the problem so with fractal as opposed to some of the other companies we've looked at recently fractal not only notified us before we found about it from you all from someone in our audience emailing us but it also was very open with us and it shared the story it didn't try to hide the fact that there was a problem it didn't avoid using the word hazard when it was appropriate and so fractal is very open but also it was invested in fixing the issue fractal kept us updated with emails basically every few days about the progress it was making with third-party firms that were looking over the new designs or creating the new designs and the progress it was making with manufacturing so we reported on this a few times along the way in hardware news or in the other video we did but in fact it was updating us so much that it was like we would have had an update video every two days if we kept reporting on it uh most updates were small incremental but the point is that fractal maintains very open communication it pulled this is the most important it pulled back the products that it had shipped every fractals warrant case from what they told us that had not yet sold had been recalled to fractal to fix the issue so that's key because it's better than other companies where they might just go oops well those are out there now so anyway we'll fix it going forward and just hope none of those computers catch on fire so this was a much better approach to a potentially serious problem some small notes so this this nexus hub from previously one of the other cases fraxel made that i think patrick talked about this but fractal has switched back to the manufacturer for this particular hub you can find this out by looking up the ul marks on each of these and figure out who the manufacturer is so this one is from huizhou huayung and they are a manufacturer that did not appear on the new torrent hub so the one before anyway the revision with the revision it looks like fractal has come back to that company the old one looked pretty good from what we could tell it's it's fairly advanced it's got reasonably good design so frankly going back to that makes sense ultimately for the new one the big takeaway is that there were far more changes than were necessary to strictly fix the issue so it's fixed and you get a better fan hub if you haven't contacted fractal yet to get a replacement again it seems like the volume of people who actually got a torrent before this was discovered is very low but if you happen to get one contact fractal get the replacement and uh destroy the old one so i you really should probably just cut it up and then send it to e-waste recycling or something so that no one actually uses it because it is a hazard uh and that's the problem but looks good we're pretty happy with the result definitely very happy with how fractal handled the issue um that would have been the difference if if this this could have turned out very differently where we gave the torrent a very strongly positive review and if we found out about this issue either ourselves uh because ours eventually got scratched and it shorted or if a user emailed us and showed us the issue people are aware of it now because of the h1 stuff if fraxel didn't take steps to remedy it like it did what would have happened is we'd be posting a video revoking our review and basically saying nope can't trust anyone anymore never mind don't buy it so two very different outcomes here and we're happy with how they handled it so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more you can go to store.gamersaccess.net or patreon.com gamersnexus helps out directly we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 321,981

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, fractal torrent, fractal fan hub, fractal torrent fan hub, fractal torrent fan hub fire, fractal torrent fan hub replacement, fractal torrent rma, fractal torrent fixed, best airflow cases, best cases, best cases 2021

Id: R1EcppuGxCY

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NothingUnknown]

Fractal should be thanking nzxt for screwing up so bad. I don’t think this would have gotten such coverage if there wasn’t an example of such a poor response from them on the books.

I wouldn’t have thought that the handling of an issue would actually drive me to want this case (though I can’t in good conscience with a perfectly fine FT02).

[u/hi11bi11y]

Looks like my next case will be a Fractal.

[u/InvincibleBird]

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Fractal Torrent Torpedoed at Launch
• 02:16 - How Fractal Handled This
• 03:54 - Identifying the Problems
• 05:35 - New vs. Old Plating
• 06:54 - Improvements in the New PCB & Schematic
• 08:50 - Even More Improvements
• 11:08 - Standoffs on Older Hub
• 12:44 - Multimeter Testing & Diagnosis
• 14:14 - New PCB is Fixed (Testing)
• 15:43 - Good Job, Fractal

[u/Leafar3456]

Are they using a wrong lens for closeups? I feel like half the time they're out of focus.

[u/kxta_]

I always gawk over various cases when I’m planning a build, but at the end of the day I always end up with a boring black fractal tower, they’re just so practical and reliable

edit: realized I said practical twice and it sounded dumb, but maybe it drives the point home

[u/NadeMagnet69]

lol Imagine loosing your whole expensive gaming PC or worse, your house over a simple fan hub. Fan hubs can be bought for like 10 bucks. So if they're retailing for that low imagine what it costs to make.

[u/double0cinco]

Man, the torrent is such a beast. Great to see fractal making things right.

[u/____candied_yams____]

This makes me happy to support them. Bought the FD Node 804 this year.

[u/Spacewok]

Love Fractal. I've had a Define C Mini for the last few years and it's been an excellent case. My audio headers died a few weeks ago and I contacted support to see if I could get a new one even though I was out of warranty. I got a replacement piece for free the next week. I can't imagine buying a case from anyone else.