There are several major factors you must consider when selecting a new case for your current system, or selecting a new case for a new build. Although Futurelooks isn’t in the business of recommending specific PC chassis’ to people, we are in the business of showing people what to look so they can see what they want or need. For example, many of us think that we need an enormous full tower to get all the performance out of a system, when in reality, we might need the “right sized” case. And that’s why we’ll be looking at a Small Form Factor (SFF) PC chassis called the Fractal Design Node 304 which gives a lot of features and functions in a smaller foot print.
Features and Specifications
The Fractal Design Node 304 mini-ITX chassis measures 250 x 210 x 374 mm (W x H x D) and weighs 4.9 kgs or 10.14 lbs. But it still has support for a full sized ATX power supply, a 165 mm tall CPU tower cooler, and a full-sized graphics card up to 310 mm (12.2 inches) in length. There is also a modular HDD cage design with support for up to 6 HDD’s or SSD’s.
Motherboard selection is limited to most mini-ITX or DTX motherboards and still has two expansion slots which will most commonly be used for a GPU, but in the case of a file server, a hardware RAID card would also be a good choice.
The case comes with three Silent Series R2 hydraulic bearing fans (one 140 mm for rear exhaust and two 92 mm fans for front intake), and a built-in fan controller with three connectors which adds a lot of value to the package. You will also find dust filters over the large side intake for your dedicated graphics card, a filter over the front intakes, and a filter for the PSU. The front I/O has 3.5 mm mic and speaker jacks, Power button, and two LED indicators for power/HDD use. There is also support for USB 3.0 via two front connectors.
The Fractal Design Node 304 is an all steel frame and with a solid aluminum face plate. There are no external ODD slots for this case which was done to save space. And speaking of premium, the price of the Node 304 thankfully is not. It can be found for less than $99 US at most retailers.
What’s in the Box?
The box for the Node 304 itself is not impressive at all with the plain brown box and black writing. While not eye-catching, it does protect the product adequately in shipment and will be forgotten once you get it home to the workbench. Inside you’ll find a user manual, your standard bag of accessories which includes all your screws, stand-offs, but only three zip ties.There isn’t much else notable in the box, but there isn’t much you can add here either (except for maybe a few more zip ties). The Node 304 appears to have the features we want from a SFF case so lets get down to investigating them more closely.
Fractal Design Node 304 – Exterior
The Node 304 has one of the more attractive designs for a small form factor chassis. The simple, clean lines are complemented well by a black matte surface. The face is a solid piece of brushed aluminum carefully painted to match the black of the rest of the case. This is very hard to do thanks to the difference in the natural reflective surface of aluminum and a very nice touch here. We can picture the Node 304 as the chassis of choice for an HTPC or media server. The matte black and soft curves should mate well with your other home theatre components as well.
The front I/O is located on the lower right side of the case just in front of the PSU exhaust vent. Starting at the top, the 3.5 mm mic and speaker jacks are very well spaced apart. Then you have a pair of USB 3.0 ports (backwards compatible with USB 2.0) which are rather close together. I found it hard to use both USB 3.0 ports when using my Corsair flash drive due to its wide body design. Thinner USB devices or cables are best used here. Finally at the very bottom is the power button, making it a little less easy to hit it by mistake.
In front of the power button is a blue LED indicator light in a thin slit in the face. Below the front bezel you will find a white LED indicator for the HDD use. While these are fairly bright, they are not distracting as their angle (if the case is positioned on your right) faces away from you. We would also like to have seen the power LED be white as well to match the rest of the case’s color theme or even a way to dim it.
The rear of the case has a very striking appearance as the 140 mm fan takes up nearly 60% of the back panel. There is an issue with the placement of this fan and I will go over that in detail later. Speaking of fans, the Node 304 also has a 3 speed fan controller with three 3-pin headers. This gives you quick and easy access to the fan speed by placing your hand on the top left corner and moving the switch with your finger tips to the desired position of low, medium, or high. Initially we thought this would be inconvenient, but it works very well thanks to the small form factor of the case.
Now that we have a clear idea of the case’s style and appearance, lets move on to the interior.
Fractal Design Node 304 – Interior
Once your open the Node 304, the white accent color will jump out at you. All of the Silent Series R2 fans have white impellers, and the modular storage drive cages have a glossy white surface. These are nice touches, but we think it is wasted when you can’t even see these details unless the case is open. Fractal Design may want to consider a version of the Node 304 with a window to make better use of the great color choices.
Everything in the design of the case is well thought out. The power supply bay is positioned below the hanging drive cages and reaches the rear of the case via an extension cable. This keeps your PSU from hovering over your CPU, depriving it of much-needed airflow, as is the norm for many SFF cases on the market.
The hanging drive cages themselves allow for up to 6 total storage drives of either 3.5″ or 2.5″ and can be removed if you need more space to work with inside the case. We found these cages to also be very well constructed with some flexibility. In addition to the rubber grommets, the cages absorb most vibration and help to minimize drive noise.
The mini ITX or mini DTX motherboards install at the bottom with no obstructions, so you can fit a tower CPU cooler in the Node 304 up to 165mm in height. The issue here is that mini ITX and mini DTX motherboards have a non-standard layout where the natural position for a CPU cooler goes from left to right, not front to back. This means the cooler will pull air from a side of the case with no accessible ventilation for it. There are some coolers that have more directional mounting options to help improve the airflow though so we recommend checking out your options.
It is not noticeable until you open the Fractal Node 304, but everything has a compartmentalized airflow. The power supply has a dedicated intake and exhaust vent to ensure it gets cool air from the bottom of the case. The GPU side is designed to allow for your graphics card to pull in air from the side and exhaust it out the rear. This leaves the three provided Silent Series R2 fans to provide airflow to everything else. Lets install some hardware and see exactly how well it does this.
Test System Setup
We chose an appropriate list of hardware to best utilize the space given to us inside the Node 304 as well as appropriate software to test and stress the case under load…
Hardware
- Motherboard: ASRock FM2A85X-ITX
- CPU: AMD A10-5800K 3.8 GHz (4.2 GHz Max Turbo) Socket FM2
- GPU: AMD on-die Radeon HD 7660D
- CPU Cooler: AMD Stock CPU Cooler for 100W+ TDP (for testing)
- Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X 2133 MHz (9-11-10-27) @ 1866 MHz (9-10-9-27)
- Power Supply: Antec 850W HCP 80+ Gold
- SSD: Patriot Pyro SATA III MLC 60 GB (Sandforce 2281 controller)
- HDD: Western Digital WD1000DHTZ 1 TB VelociRaptor 10k RPM
Software
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- AIDA64 Extreme Edition
- OCCT
- FurMark GPU Stress Tester
We feel that the above components should provide sufficient challenge for the Node 304 as an HTPC or casual gaming system without a discrete GPU. With the rise of the APU and onboard graphics becoming more powerful, we can finally see this being a viable installation option. We might install a GPU for some additional testing in the near future as this would also be a great LAN party system on the go. Let’s address our current installation in more detail.
Installation Notes
Installing the power supply is very simple and should be done first. We recommend you only use standard ATX power supplies with modular connectors if possible. The longer PSU’s will get in the way of full-sized graphics cards as was the case with the Antec 850W HCP we selected for this build. Though I could still install a dedicated graphics card, I am now limited to a length of only about 7 inches. This is not a problem for us as we only intended to use the on-die GPU of the A10-5800K in this build, but could be a problem if you were looking to install a high-end graphics card.
Installation of storage drives was the easiest and is one of best “non-tool-free” systems I have ever used.
Next, we install the motherboard, RAM, CPU, and CPU cooler. The crossbar on the top of the case can be removed by taking out 4 screws to give you more room to work with if needed. This is great if your CPU cooler mount is easier to install outside of the case. In fact you may want to install all of the aforementioned components at once after assembling them outside of the case. They will not obstruct the four motherboard mounts on the bottom of the chassis.
Our motto for the Fractal Node 304 during installation was, “It will fit, but how much or what do you have to give up to install it?” Although we were even able to install the massive Noctua NH-D14 cooler and both of its fans, the cooler is so massive it blocked the use of the 4 center drive bays. There was no space for SATA cables once the cooler was installed and it required the removal of the rear fan. The best thing to do is to keep your CPU cooling options to AiO liquid cooling with 120 mm or 140 mm radiators or single tower air coolers with up to 120 mm fans if you want something more than a stock cooler inside.
The number one thing you need to be aware of with the Fractal Node 304 (as with most SFF cases) is how your size limitations work. The Node 304 limitations are more flexible than most because of its modular interior design; however, this often means you can’t install whatever you would like at the cost of something else. Or you may have to downgrade/upgrade/sidegrade a component to suit the build. Similar to what we found out about the BitFenix Prodigy when we built our Ultimate LAN Party System.
Now that we have everything installed, we will continue on with a test of thermal and acoustic performance with our chosen components.
Thermal Performance
I will stressing the CPU and GPU (or rather APU) using OCCT and FurMark while monitoring the temperature using AIDA64. We did have some trouble with the ASRock FM2A85X ITX automatic fan controller though. However, once disabled the CPU fan would run at 100% all the time instead of reverting to the AMD Cool & Quiet. As such I tested the system by setting the idle speed to 10% and thermal target temperature to 45°C manually using a stock AMD cooler. Here are our results.
The Node 304 has little trouble keeping the CPU temperature under control at low, medium, or high. High setting on the built-in fan controller did bring the idle temp down 1°C and the low allowed the CPU to get over the 45°C target. I will work on finding a way to fully disable the ASRock fan control in the BIOS and will revisit this later in a follow up post. The full load figures are as accurate as I want but should give you a general idea. On the up side, the idle performance of the Node 304 is very good compared to previously reviewed cases. Some of which are much larger.
Acoustic Performance
Now we will see now well the Node 304 handles noise the task of noise reduction. This test is especially important as it also directly correlates to the thermal performance. Since my test system was doing its best to maintain that 45°C temperature target, the CPU cooler fan needed to pushed much higher than in previous tests. Lets see how that affects the Node 304 here.
We find it surprising the Node 304 is the quietest case tested so far. I attribute this to the three Silence Series R2 fans with their extremely low mechanical noise. The only noise generated by the case is airflow, leaving the CPU cooler as the primary source of noise during full load tests. Even at over 4000 RPM the CPU cooler is muffled thanks to minimal intake and exhaust vents on the Node 304.
The acoustics of this case at high speed is noticeable, but very mellow thanks to the lack of high-pitched mechanical whines. You still need to switch it back to low to watch a movie, but I doubt you would notice the case acoustics otherwise.
Final Thoughts
The Fractal Design Node 304 delivers everything promised on its feature list for the most part. But we don’t like to be limited by the selection of hardware. As PC enthusiasts, we often reuse or re-purpose components when building the kinds of specialized builds the Fractal Node 304 is design for, whether it be an HTPC or file server. While this could be a hindrance at times, the Node 304 is as flexible as it can be given its size restraints.
The Node 304 forces you to put the build into perspective while giving you extra room to work as needed. This means it is great for an HTPC, LAN Party gaming system, or home network server but not all at once. If you need a full-sized graphics card, space for 5 or 6 hard drives, or a low noise system then you need not look any further. But again, not at the same time.
The nice thing about the DIY PC market is that there are different choices to select from in the Small Form Factor case market. Though some are either too expensive or much bulkier. At the price point set at less than $99 US, the only chassis I can consider a direct competitor is the BitFenix Prodigy at $79.99 US and that chassis brings with it some of its own pros/cons.
In the end, the Fractal Design Node 304 brings innovation and great design ideas, at an affordable price, to a market space that desperately needs more great options.
Pros:
- Sleek and stylish design
- filters on all intakes
- support for a full-sized graphics card
- support for ATX power supplies
- support for tower CPU coolers
Cons:
- Various systems interfere with each other
- Cleaning filters requires opening case
- No external ODD slot
- Power plug can be difficult to connect
- Only 3 zip ties in the bag!
Overall Score: 8.5 / 10.0
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