Fractal Terra Mini-ITX Case Review: Build Quality, Thermals, Acoustics, & Cable Management

foreign [Applause] [Music] this is the fraxel Terra Mini ITX case we're reviewing it today and it has some extremely unique features but also some extremely unique noise characteristics as a result of this slat panel notice that when we replace the side panel with something perforated hexagonally or circularly the noise profile of the case is significantly better it's not only quieter but a lot more tolerable for frequency we'll show numbers for that in our noise chamber later we'll come back to why the slat design causes that behavior but for the mini ITX Tara here it has a lot of unique features like the gullwind doors that are fairly easily removable it also has a quickly removed top panel and this has a small piece of either leather or a vinyl on it for some alternative material choices they have a piece of wood on the bottom for the i o there's a graphite a green that we have here and then a silver and with all the doors removed we get to the core feature of the case as we're reviewing it today which is going to be that movable spine on the center and this is the center piece what we're doing because we test it in a few different orientations and it has some pretty unique thermal and acoustic characteristics this case is 180 as far as ITX cases go uh it's not crazy but 180 is still a lot for a case so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10 off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace including our recently launched gamers.nexis site where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failures I built this site personally in a couple of hours by using squarespace's fluid engine to move blocks around visually until I liked it we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers and access or click the link below fraxel's been on a bit of a tear with cases lately so it had the the torrent behind me here which was one of actually it was the top performing ATX case when it came out and Still Remains on the top of the charts for our testing highly recommended that one the north did well for fractal as well and these are Big deviations from the old fractal that we knew where previously it was the sort of boring and businessy defined series all black solid panels and thermals were often questionable so fraxel is moving away from a lot of that they still have those options but exploring with things like the Terra is hopefully going to keep the company fresh now this design we have plenty of criticisms of most of them are in fact thermal or acoustic but from an ease of installation standpoint there's a lot that was done well here like accessibility to the internals of the case the central spine is part of that it runs from the front to the back inside the case and it can be adjusted left to right by 30 millimeters to allow for more room either on the GPU or the CPU side the adjustments are marked one through seven but there aren't any steps or catches in between so it can be set between the marks freely in general it works well the terra's direct com competition would be the 220 dollar form D T1 sandwich fractal obviously Drew inspiration from this case and judging by the name you could tell that it is also a sandwich style but with a more traditional mesh panel the loc ghost S1 is another direct competitor which happens to be priced at 180 on sale at the time of writing exactly the same as the tarot they're also less expensive options like this Dan Case A4 H2O which we're actually also working towards reviewing this one is 155 right now so it's a little bit cheaper than the Terra and poses some Fierce competition being a relatively similar form factor just with a bit more height to it so the ITX reviews we're doing we're just getting restarted with these again we have a separate video talking about some of what we're working on for them what our test processes are and we have a methodological piece that either is already online or will be online shortly to explain to you the testing parameters and the fixed components versus the variable components it's very complicated to review an ITX case because they're not all made the same like ATX in terms of support but we can back all this up with our over a decade of experience reviewing ATX cases for finer details and specifically with ITX that's what matters so this review and setting the stage for the rest of our ITX reviews coming up will focus largely on what we're branding the pen in the ass Factor uh or the pita Factor so the pita factor is a scale of how much of a pain in the asset is to build in a case that is of a size like this because that is the number one qualification of a good ITX case thermal is important of course and so are Acoustics but if it's really difficult to build in or if the component choice is significantly limited and difficult to nail down compatibilities that kind of eliminates a case from the running as an ITX option to even start with so that's what we'll be focusing on for most of these reviews get into ease of installation features so the Terra is a shoebox sized sandwich layout in this case the components are back to back on either side of a two and a half millimeter thick steel spine for reference a lot of ATX case motherboard trays max out at one millimeter sometimes a little more so the structural support is definitely present in the Tariff an included PCI IE Riser connects the main compartment with the video card the movable spine means that the GPU and the CPU Cooler clearances are variable based on spine position of course and that enables sacrificing space of one to give to the other simplifying the sliding scale the maximum CPU Cooler height is 77 millimeters that would have a GPU clearance at 43 millimeters of depth which would fit a 2.0 slot card with about one to three millimeters of clearance depending on tolerances the maximum GPU cooler space is 72 millimeters which would have the CPU clearance at a heavily reduced 48 millimeters a 40 90 Founders Edition is about 61 millimeters wide but the problem with that card and we could show it in some of our footage is that it would have trouble clearing vertically so the depth almost shockingly can tactically fit it's just that these cables you really don't want to bend them that much there is a specific PCI Sig requirement on the curvature on the bend and once you put an Fe in here with a 12 volt high power cable or especially an adapter coming out of it it's not it's really just basically doesn't fit it can be forced to fit which is not a great idea or you can start playing around with adapters but it would just be easier to buy a shorter card at the max CPU Cooler clearance of 77 millimeters you could fit something like this this is a deep coil and 600 we chose it's a pretty new cooler this is 67 millimeters tall so that gives you an idea if we're pretty close to the maximum clearance now keep in mind when choosing these parts that because of some of the acoustic issues we demoed briefly earlier you don't necessarily want the fan to be too close to that panel alternatively a noctua NHL 965 would work that's 65 millimeters so it's two mil shorter than this if you go to the GPU biased orientation in the spine where it's shifting to give the GPU more clearance for a fatter cooler and then taking that space from the CPU you could go down as far as something like this and this is even a little smaller still than is necessary this is a knock to a lh9 and I so this one is 37 millimeters tall and the maximum clearance in that configuration would be 48 millimeters if you were positioning for a larger or the largest possible video card cooler now technically they say they support a 120 millimeter liquid cooler radiator uh it basically isn't compatible and even with smaller 120 millimeter coolers as we'll talk about later we don't think they really deserve to be on the spec sheet you could technically Force something in there but it's not particularly user friendly nor does it make sense for other dimensions the Terra is 343 millimeters long 153 millimeters wide and 218 millimeters tall with an external volume of 11.4 liters the Leon Li 011 air mini is 44.2 liters and the A4 H2O Dan Case is 11.1 for reference an Xbox series X is 6.9 liters methodologically we've decided to stick to exterior volumetric measurements when we talk about comparing volume of ITX cases it matters more and the interior measurements are tricky because manufacturers like to just decide which things to not count it's not standardized so some of them will decide not to count the feet on the case some of them will count it some of them won't count things that protrude so we're using exterior measurements for volume for cooling the Terra doesn't come with any fans and the manual only shows an optional step for mounting a single 120 millimeter fan in the bottom under the power supply but that's not possible with an sfxl power supply you can technically slot two slim 120 millimeter fans underneath the case they're screw holes for them but it isn't unofficially recommended configuration and for good reason we'll come back to Cooling in the thermal section later for that time to get it to fit and finish the terra's overall build quality and finish are good the front panel features a small strip of wood along the bottom where the limited front i o is located the power button is color matched aluminum which is a nice detail and the front i o itself is unfortunately extremely limited it doesn't include any audio and we'd like to have seen at least the combo Port even though that's not our favorite option for materials the aluminum exterior looks and feels high-end on this model although the Black version of the case that we saw at computex was a future fingerprint and scuff problem waiting to happen the Terra uses thick Metals all over internally and externally and it's up to eight millimeters in some spots the one exception to the sturdiness for this case is the golden door where it basically uses a plastic knob to act as the end of travel so if we look at this on one side this sockets into the case panel first and then on the other side you've got this simple mechanism where you can pull it to expose the hook and then there's this piece that bumps the travel so let's demo this what we'd be concerned about is One Missed movement and it would be pretty easy to snap this whole thing I mean even at this stage in the rotation I feel like if I pulled this another five degrees probably we'd be breaking plastic uh so it's not something that a user should be doing but there's really not a lot of play there for an accident like bumping it with your arm when you're reaching for a component or something like that leaving it open walking by and brushing it the wrong way so that is definitely the weakest part of the case and we'd like to see an alternative solution to that in the future because of all that our recommendation is simply to just remove the door when you do any kind of Maintenance or building with this case the terror comes with basic accessories most notably a sled for an extra two and a half inch drive and standoffs for the power supply Mount we'll come back to those later the manual is mostly good it shows example configurations and major component clearances which is helpful although we didn't like its representation of how tightly folded the GPU power cable is don't copy that example coming back to technically supporting a 120 millimeter radiator it severely limits how long of a GPU you can use and the whole idea comes off as an afterthought or taking a a box for marketing fitting the pump of a CLC through the cutout under the power supply isn't possible without removing the entire bottom of the case which isn't an operation detailed in the manual and probably shouldn't be done unless necessary speaking of cooler fitment again though one thing we noticed is that the bottom of this panel slightly covers the bottom of a cooler like this one so we're cutting off almost half of this bottom part of the fan it's like a quarter of the total flow through area for the fan because the slats don't extend all the way down now the reason they did this we're pretty sure is to make the bottom of the slats here align with the top of the wood panel so it's got the nice symmetry with the downside being that you are cutting access to air a little bit on this cooler so that can definitely be improved and when we do a panel open or a panelist test you'll see those numbers reflected in testing as to how much impedance it causes and on the note of cooling slats are generally more difficult to tune a fan for for cooler so there are coolers that won't have the problems that we showed here but more often than not when a cooler is right up against a panel like this and this is why we test it in a few configurations later it's going to produce a lot of noise so one of the things we did was actually hold a couple different panels up we took this one off that was risky that plastic uh we took that one off and we would support these right up against it of course with the top panel still on and what this allowed us to do is we weren't doing thermals or anything we're just testing how does this different perforation pattern affect the acoustic profile of the cooler underneath up we found the fine mesh of the ssupd mesh delicious or mesh room to have the most agreeable noise profile and that's also a common material and pattern for ATX cases since you can't actually replace the side panel short of just removing it entirely your options are to lower the fan speed or to move the spine to get the fan further away from the panel we'll get to our detailed objective analysis in the noise section of the review later GPU is up to 322 millimeters long will fit maximum thickness for video cards has some caveats and it depends on both the spine position and the height of the GPU with a spine position in slot 1 GPS vertically shorter than 131 millimeters can be up to 43 millimeters thick gpus that measure 131 to 145 millimeters vertically are limited to 33 millimeters thick with the spine in position 7 for Max GPU space those numbers change to 72 and 62 millimeters thick respectively one slot of thickness is 20 millimeters for reference so two would be about 40. the RTX 4070 Fe we're using for testing measures 244 millimeters long 112 millimeters tall and 40 mil thick we also test fit several other gpus you've been looking at those now to see what issues may come up the reference RX 7900 XTX fit with the spine in position three without issues the tallest card we had on hand was this Asus strix Vega 64. that one's 139 millimeters tall that one fit with the spine in position three as well but uses nearly all of the vertical space which further compartmentalizes the enclosure the RTX 4080 Fe required biasing the spine farther towards the CPU side reducing the cooler clearance significantly GPU power cable management again can also be tricky on taller cards for power supply support it'll fit both sfx and sfxl this would be a simpler fit you can see we're much smaller here this is a Revolt sfx power supply so that buys you a little bit more space now for a power supply like the one we used the other downside of sfxl is that it eliminates use of the floor mounted SSD sled or fan Mount unless you need the extra power that sfx allo forwards we would recommend sticking to a true sfx power supply in the Terra just for ease of use and flexibility fractal could have made this a little better by having the power supply bracket Mount just a bit higher within the chassis there's a few millimeters of empty space between the 90 degree AC power cable and the top panel that should have been taken advantage of there are a couple alternate ways to install the power supply one utilizes the included standoffs to move the power supply bracket off the spine by six millimeters or 10 millimeters this is pretty interesting because it gives more space for air if using a GPU with a flow through design this is easy to do but leaves the whole power supply less supported and unsettlingly wobbly the other Power Supply Mount option is flipped with the fan facing the spine and the back of the GPU this would direct the warm air from a flow through GPU exhaust straight into the power supply you using its own fan to assist in getting the air out of the case installing a power supply like this will make it operate under a higher internal ambient temperature for the PSU but most high-end units should be able to handle it and you wouldn't want to do this if you're using a GPU with a solid backplate because that would just choke the power supply now we're going to get into the testing section so this will be both thermal and acoustic and for the Acoustics we'll be in this Hemi anechoic chamber we recently built it and we have a video in my shouting I don't know it's so quiet in here we have a video on the Channel showing how the chamber was built it's really cool and you can learn more about it there for testing methodology for ITX I'm like continually lowering my voice because how quiet it is for eye tax methods we're going to have a separate video coming up soon detailing the full thermal and acoustic testing procedures thermal though is pretty straightforward for this we are mostly focusing on the case against itself so in other words we're looking at multiple configurations within the same case to try and understand where it performs well and where it performs poorly because ultimately with ITX it is so massively variable compared to ATX that every build is going to be different in very large ways in terms of thermal performance and so we're choosing sets of Hardware based on the case rather than a completely standardized set we have a standardized motherboard CPU and for the most part GPU and RAM and SSD so there are a lot of controls frequency and voltage is controlled as well but the cooler will change now that means only some tests will have comparisons against other cases because it doesn't make sense to put a really small case up against a large ITX case where one can't fit a larger cooler and the other one can because if you standardize you have to choose the smallest of them and it's not a realistic or a fair representation so for this we're focusing on the Terra for the acoustic side where basically in a completely silent room so the outer room if we disable all AC in the building is about 26 DBA for the noise floor this room is between 11 and 14 depending on what time of day we're running that test but for the most part it's about 13 to 13.7 for the testing we're doing today we explained some of the why for this chamber in a hardware news episode we'll link that below the basics of it though are that this allows us to completely isolate outside noises so when we're collecting data for the case we can look at just the case in isolation and not have to worry about trying to interpret whether some frequency in the testing is from an external thing like a car outside or a noise in the building versus what is truly from the products now of course the case doesn't really produce noise at least maybe on a cosmic level but it really doesn't produce noise and it has no fans so what we're testing here is how the components interact with the case and what sort of noises the case causes those components to emit for microphone we keep it in this desiccant bin and this is it has to be humidity controlled so it's 10 or less humidity in this bin and this is what we use for testing we'll talk with that in our methods piece in the future and again it's positioned one meter distance let's talk peer review while we aren't new to acoustic testing in general we've been doing basic DBA measurements and noise test controls for around a decade now we are brand new to this level of depth because of the increase in quality of our instrumentation and the Chamber we'll be adding new tasks with which we have less experience but accuracy is a proactive process and as such we recruited a third-party lab in the U.S to validate and test our Chamber against ISO standards and produce a white paper for us to use on the chambers characteristics we'll be talking about their work publicly in a separately published methodology piece in the future We additionally recruited peer review from two separate and independent acoustic testing experts in the industry one was Mike chin the founder and former owner of silent PC review and who revolutionized the industry for acoustic testing he now offers consulting services for Acoustics and we retained him for planning our tests originally and also bought some of his old equipment from we also asked him to review our results for this video and he provided some feedback the other was rs's lab over at cybernetics the facility which offers professional power supply certification and testing including Acoustics analysis RSS lab has held many levels of ISO certification over the years RS has done similar work to what we're presenting today on PC cases under his Hardware Busters company we'll put the set of questions we sent to RS on the screen the data we're presenting and the analysis we've written has been through both of these experts we recognize the responsibility we hold when conducting tests of this caliber and we'll be working with peer review while we establish this aspect of testing the same will go for fantastic we've already talked to a couple of companies who can help us with that but that's in the future we can also highly recommend rs's Hardware Busters YouTube channel and his website to see some of the nominal work he's done for the power supply industry but all that said this section has been peer reviewed and we have some plans to improve even further in the future so with all that stated let's get into the frequency spectrum plot and the DB levels then we'll look at Thermals this frequency spectrum plot shows what's going on with the side open the case isn't only quieter overall despite the same fan speeds but its noise reduction primarily comes from 500 Hertz to the 4 000 hertz frequency range the biggest deviation is around 850 Hertz with reduced but also deviating spikes from 600 to 1100 Hertz one of the notes that Mike chin made about some of these spikes were seen in the frequency plot is that it can also be vibrational noise not just the fan noise only and he's right there's a mix of both characteristics here Mike recommended that we buy a vibrometer in the future so that we can also look at this aspect of where the noise is coming from and we're already looking at a couple of options for those the previous chart was made with special acoustic testing software but this next image is from something far are simpler Adobe Audition which is used for sound mixing these are unmodified frequency visualizations the first image shows the case with the side open note that most of the noise is from a lower fan hum and so that's a more acceptable type of noise here's the side closed test notice here that we have a higher volume of 600 Hertz 800 Hertz and 1100 Hertz noises will flash between these two images a couple times to make it easier to see the differences the total volume or noise level is also just higher with the sides closed in our testing with the spine biasing the CPU Cooler towards the side panel now as we said earlier if we push it towards the GPU instead this annoying noise goes away but it's those specific ranges the 600 800 and 1100 Hertz noises that make it annoying with the side closed with the cooler close to the side and this is kind of what we were getting at it's really just the first look at what we want to do with this chamber because now instead of saying it's annoying here's an example we we can say it's annoying here's an example which we showed you already and here's some objective numbers to try and explain what's going on and we'll have a separate video on this more but ultimately what's happening is the CPU Cooler fan blades end up being somewhat parallel to these slats and that causes a pressure that makes the annoying noise and will have a separate Deep dive on that as one last demo we'll isolate the range of about 750 Hertz to about a thousand Hertz so you can hear that specific annoying tone hopefully that helps put some sounds to the numbers now the last one is just a simple noise level chart the absolute number doesn't matter much here remember that you can control your fans to affect the noise in this case has no fans so all we're really testing again is how the cooler fans interact with the case panels the noise level is significantly lower about 5.6 DBA reduced when the panels are open that's despite exposing the fans more directly to the outside of the case so this just proves that the slats conflict with that let's move on to thermals fraxel's web page for the Terra says make the most of natural airflow through the ventilated top side and bottom panels fractal here is probably referring to the fact that hot air rises but as we've said before that doesn't have much to do with Cooling in a case where there are high RPM fans involved it just overpowers it although there aren't case fans we still have the fans of the CPU Cooler the GPU and the power supply just like an open air setup except it's not open air it's important to understand that the numbers we'll show here are only comparable amongst themselves you can't compare them to other cases directly unless the other case explicitly uses the same exact Hardware bios configuration and fan speeds for now we only have the Terra against itself in various configurations we'll occasionally add competing cases to the charts as we move forward with more ITX reviews our stock setup in the Terra has the spine in position 3 which is as close as we could run it to the middle four position that it comes in out of the box the an600 CPU Cooler has its fan speed at 100 percent and the RTX 4070fe has its fans locked to 44 frequency and voltage are locked for the CPU and frequency is plus or minus a couple percent on the GPU so these are very controlled here's the first chart under a full system torture workload at steady state the pcores averaged 58.6 degrees Celsius delta T over ambient the full all core average was a little lower since e-cores pulled less power and run cooler to determine how much the side panels are restricting error we next test it with the side doors fully opened here the p-core is dropped by three degrees so that should be considered our best possible outcome with this setup the difference is greater with the GPU we'll see that in a moment adding two slim 120 millimeter intake fans to the bottom only improved from Baseline by 1.4 degrees Celsius that's close to run to run deviation it's not worth all the noise and Hassle and costs to add slim fans to the bottom it's not an advertised configuration and for good reason there's not enough table clearance for these fans to breathe the legs would need to be longer sliding the spine over to position one for as much room on the CPU side as possible didn't impact CPU thermals to any meaningful degree it stayed with an error the alternate power supply configurations gave interesting results the 10 millimeter standoffs reduced Baseline by about the same as the bottom fan setup however installing the PSU in a flipped orientation with fan facing the GPU didn't have a meaningful impact on CPU throwables versus stock with the data leaning slightly warmer the GPU thermal chart is up now showing delta T over ambient steady state averages for GPU core memory and Hot Spot temperatures our stock setup resulted in the worst temperatures on the chart due to warm air recirculation and the GPU side of the case without any chassis fans to force it out you're relying mostly on the GPU to get rid of the warmer air in the case opening up the Terrace Gullwing doors unsurprisingly gave us the best results 8 degrees Celsius lower on the GPU core and a mass of 10 degrees lower on The Hot Spot reading these are huge swings for GPU thermals showing the restrictions caused by this style of door ventilation a higher porosity would help fractal here setting the spine in position 1 drops about 4 degrees Celsius from the core versus stock it's counter-intuitive at first since that setting gives the GPU the least space but it's actually better because the gpu's intake is now right up against the side panel so it can get fresh air and we didn't have the same acoustic problem with the gpus fans against that ventilation now that is going to depend on the fan design and it'll be card to card the alternative power supply mounts performed identically both better than in stock for GPU thermals cards with a flow through area on the cooler are naturally going to benefit from having lowered airflow restrictions and both alternate power supply installations help with this given that the 4070 Fe doesn't totally line up with the PSU and the Terra this should matter even more with a larger or longer card like the 4080 Fe or a gigabyte AeroCart and it would matter less so with the traditional non-flow through card like say a 7900 XD reference remember that the power supply can eat more heat this way the power supply at least this one can take it but the cheapest ones could have shortened life so this is an instance where you really will want to spend a little bit more on the power supply given the better CPU thermal performance we recommend running with the 10 millimeter standoffs on the power supply mount with the gpus close to the side panel as possible of course since each build is so different you may need to adjust if your card produces different or more noise than ours did overall then the most important aspect of any ITX case is going to be that pain in the ass Factor the Terra does well here it is built incredibly well in terms of enabling the user to access everything as much as possible for the size that it is your best fit in a case like this will be a mid-range gaming PC going high-end even if you can force it to work even if you can do tuning with reducing voltage and really trying to optimize things this case just isn't out of the box it's not a good fit for that type of ultra high-end build 180 dollars for ITX it's not a crazy price it's high in sort of an objective sense but you look at other ITX cases and the other competitors kind of start at 155 for direct competition from the Dan Case and we'll be looking at the A4 H2O next the most obvious Improvement would be changing the vent shape away from slats to fix the noise profile we'd also like to see a future revision 2 incorporate better access to the bottom of the case and really focus on squeezing every millimeter of space out by moving the power supply a little bit higher The Thermals are fine the slats seem to be accommodating enough a higher porosity would help with some of the impedance that we saw there is a little bit of a recirculation effect that happens where the warmed air from a downdraft cooler on the CPU side Finds Its way into the GPU so where possible pushing the GPU cooler up against the wall of the case should be the better choice as we showed earlier adding the 10 millimeter power supply standoffs also helps with flow through gpus and that's really the point of our testing with ITX we're trying to look at multiple different ways to build the thing rather than purely comparative so that first of all we can see is it trash and secondly we can see what the best build is so overall we like the fractals ease of installation features they are excellently thought out we like how the case came together thermally it is acceptable this case makes good sense with a mid-range build and we're looking forward to our next ITX review to see how our opinions shift and change as we look at more and more of these new ITX Styles that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more to support us directly you can go to store.gamers access.net this chamber is funded basically by people supporting us on patreon and through our store so if you want to see more testing with stuff like this in the future head over there and grab something like a mod mat a solder mat or one of our other shirts or items and thanks for watching as always subscribe for more we'll see you all next

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 705,013

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, fractal terra, fractal terra review, fractal terra itx, mini itx cases, best mini itx cases, mini itx case reviews, mini itx case benchmarks, fractal terra itx case test, fractal terra worth it, fractal terra cooler, mini itx gaming pcs, mini itx cases 2023

Id: pKiFk7tBTLg

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2023