Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Fractal North is Beautiful”.
It’S time for a build. This is the fractal North. You knew that already. That sounds different. This looks like a unique fractal accessory and there’s some thumb. Screws captured thumb screws.
Even some assembly required wood grain. Listen fractal got the memo. Everybody’S been watching level one text, they know how into wood grain. I am the woods. You know the 70s wood grain and gold.
That’S kind of coming back right, fractal, nose, it’s wood grain! It’S the first thing you see, wow, it is gold. I didn’t actually expect that the power button it’s gold and there’s a little gold accents on the feet. Look. It’S got a little piece of leather right on the top. That’S so cute.
It is a mesh side panel, at least the variation that I requested from fractal is a mesh side panel, but it is reinforced. Oh, it’s got an even little anti-vibration pads, that’s inside it has a built-in non-removable power supply shroud. Okay, not bad.
It is not designed for soundproofing, because it’s mesh, so there’s no there’s no soundproof side panel. It does have a nice mesh front dust filter, but a pretty satisfying latching mechanism too. If I do say so, myself looks like we’ve got a built-in four Channel Fan Hub as well. Now it comes installed with two 140 millimeter fans in the front. You can kind of see that here this feels a little higher end than the pop air cases, but not as high-end as something like the Define, XL accessory box just includes extra mounting screws and some hard drive dampeners. There are two removable three and a half inch hard drive trays in the bottom.
It is possible to move the trays from the top to the bottom or to move them a little bit in front to back. So the front radiator supports up to a 360 millimeter Max rear. Radiator is 120 millimeter top radiator. You can do 240, but there’s some details.
You need to be aware of. It has a two three and a half inch Drive trays and two two and a half inch Drive trays that are sort of permanently attached. You could mount a third drive if you order another tray, not a big deal. Max GPU length is 355 millimeters and the max CPU Cooler height is 170 millimeters, there’s also a bottom dust filter for the power supply, but the power supply is vented in such a way, but you could run it upside down or right side up which way is Upside down and which waist right side up now, remember our accessory this thing’s, pretty cool.
You can mount fans in this and you’ve got several different mounting positions, so you can put it in the side like this or toward the top. That’S where you need the most cooling or get a fresh air intake fans just for your GPU. Now I know of only one motherboard, that is black with gold accents, and that is the x670e Tai Chi, because of course, of course now I’ve done a full review of both our x670e Tai Chi and the new AMD am5 CPUs in the launch and everything that Goes with that, you should definitely check out our coverage of that because it’s really awesome. This is 16 cores of pure, unadulterated Madness and for this build, this is really the only choice, because the 16 core performance here really outpaces pretty much everything else.
That’S available in a desktop class form factor. I mean okay, there’s threadripper, but you know it pretty much outpaces everything else in terms of multi-core performance, but also, if you’re going to be running virtual machines for very mixed workloads. It’S not really a great situation, juggling uh, multiple different cores, especially if you run Linux or something like that with KVM between you know, CPU cores that are a little bit different.
They are actually a little bit different, even on am5, in that there’s two chiplets in here and they’re Bend differently. There’S one chip that’ll run a little faster than the other one, but at the end of the day the cores are identical and the micro architecture is identical and stuff doesn’t have to be shuffled around when you are running an application in one or the other or The other core, depending on whatever it, is that you’re doing so for this system, because it’s at least going to be a dual boot system, if not in Linux. Most of the time.
This is a really good choice. I would like to see motherboards that have more pcie slots, but for now black and gold it’ll go it’ll. Do now in case you’re wondering about this little side panel.
Yes, it is removable. You just pop the thumb screw out, slide, lift and you’re good to go. So it doesn’t make building a little easier with our tai chi in here we can see this is going to be a pretty attractive build.
I mean the gold does match pretty much exactly. I think I’m gon na put this fractal Newton power supply in it. It’S not black, but I don’t really care. This is the only fractal thousand watt power supply that I had. It doesn’t need to be a thousand Watts. I just just want it to be a thousand Watts. So, but hey it’s still solid. It’S actually older. It’S a much older power supply, but it’s still really solid. So now astute listeners will have heard that I did not say extended: ATX, motherboard or Tai Chi’s, technically, not a completely standard size, ATX, it’s a little bit longer.
Fortunately, the motherboard tray on our fractal North case Nanook, if you will, is going to fit perfectly anyway, because the motherboard tray is a little extended. It just starts to encroach on the rubber grommet territory. It’S close, but it fits now in case you’re wondering will my big honkin GPU fit? The answer is uh foreign, so fractals has your maximum clearance is 355 millimeters and what they mean is with the fans in their current configuration. So there’s room the Zotac 4090 that we have, for example, is 356.1 millimeters long. It fits even though it’s bigger than fractal specification. You do have to wedge it just a bit which is a sub-optimal now our ASRock formula, OC 6900 XT. It fits it’s only about 330 millimeters long, so no big deal it’ll fit. It almost would fit with an AIO, because you put your fans on this side and the AIO inside the case. But when you have an AIO mounted, you have less room for a GPU that is sub-optimal when uh gpus are getting really large. Absurdly large.
Now you could get a GPU that has a built-in AIO and mount it in the front and an AIO in the top of your CPU. I would like to run a 280 or a 360 for this am5 cooler, which pretty much means that I need to mount it in the front, but then that’ll limit the number of gpus that I can install in here. So that’s not super amazing, but I think for people building a reasonable desktop with a reasonable size, graphics card. This is fine.
I got ta. Try something I’m going to try something: that’s an off label use, so this thing will hold two 140 millimeter fans. I’M going to see if I can mount a radiator to the back of it so get my fractal 280 millimeter AIO with the RGB fans also going to swap the RGB fans for the plane, fans that are in the front. Uh uh yeah just cuts.
Well, I can’t believe that worked. You can see. I’Ve got my fractal 280 millimeter mounted here. I did have to slide it all the way that way, just to clear a few things and managing the cables it’s a little tight, but it does physically work more or less so that actually does work.
You got ta have a lot of extra tube. I don’t want that to bind up or anything like that, so it helps if you twist around the radiator a little bit so that the tubes will naturally want to go a certain direction and they won’t bind up for me. I found it was easier throughout the tube sort of up and over and then back around and down. That’S also possible, with a little bit better planning to tuck your cables actually inside the fan frame. Fractal left enough room around the frame that you could route. All your cables and have it come out one corner and it’d be a lot neater than what I did here, but I’m not going to take the fans back out and fix this one. I can just shove the wire in that hole and call it a day. Not bad and because I’m not using the RGB function with these fans, I’ve moved those fans up front.
Ah, that’s probably fine. We got plenty of clearance around the ram. There’S really not a lot of uh downside here. The tubes aren’t really too bound up. They sort of go up and around and over and down into the into the pump I’ve seen worse. I do have these configured as an intake.
I think that’s what I prefer that way. I’Ve got air coming in the front and side, and hopefully the warm air will naturally have a chimney effect through the top. There is enough room in the top that I could add some 140 millimeter fans. If I do need extra cooling, which is nice, I wouldn’t have expected with this uh bracket mounted in the topmost position, that it would really actually support more fans, but it really does the belt’s really coming together. The last thing to figure out is memory and storage.
Well also GPU, but we can test it without a GPU, because hey am5 has built-in gpus for memory, I’m going to be using the Kingston Fury ddr56000 kit, because it’s very fast and has very good timings. This is the Beast ddr5 RGB 6000mt per second, two 16 gigabyte dimms. These are also RGB. I didn’t go totally completely. Devoid of RGB seems impossible in this day and age. Let’S turn it on and run some tests. In addition to the gold button, it does have a dedicated, headphone and microphone Jack. Those are three and a half millimeter, five gigabit type, A ports, two of them and a type c Port. It’S very nice to see a case like this. That includes two types and one type c, instead of like one type, A and one type c, and I really like that: it’s because you’re wasting headers on the motherboard, the five and ten gigabit headers are different. It’S pretty quiet, so there you go. I kind of like how this build turned out. The only real criticisms I have of it are if you’ve got really tall, two and a half inch drives like this one. You know optane because I still like optane it’s an optane u.2. You can totally use these with u.2 m.2, u.2, breakout, cables and um. This is too thick to use with the rear panel.
It sort of jams up the side side panel a little bit. You might be able to wedge it in there and make it work, but it really didn’t didn’t settle well, they could have maybe put some more built-in two and a half inch mounting options on the power supply shroud. Maybe, although a lot of people don’t like to do that, but that would solve this problem. That said, you can mount these in the three and a half inch Drive carriers in the bottom of the case that works fine. I can live with that.
The other thing is, if only it was just about five millimeters longer, could avoid the whole 40 90 thing. If you look at the rear, the motherboard tray and everything is kind of recessed inside the case. That’S pretty standard design. We see other cases like NZXT cases, for example that are sort of flush at the back.
I think fractal could have probably flush mounted the motherboard and expansion slots kind of like NZXT and others do it, and then that would have bought them five millimeters without having to completely retool all of the tooling for their motherboard and the metal and everything else. And those extra five millimeter would make a pretty big difference. I’M really delighted that I was able to get the 280 millimeter radiator to work in the side bracket panel accessory thing, I’m sure that’s an off-label use, but at least I’m pretty sure it’s an off-label use. I did not see that in the manual unless I just can’t read and the manual which is usually really good about telling you all the possible fan and radiator placements missed the option that you could do an AIO Mount.
The way that I did at least with the fractal AIO, it was possible and it’s working out for me and the machine’s not overheating or doing anything bad. I’Ve been able to get stock performance out of the 7950x without any issues in the case, and it does sort of have the chimney effect. I let sentiments run for hours and hours and hours and oh boy, it gets warm, but the airflow from the AIO over the motherboard and memory and vrms, I think, helps along with the front intakes. Another thing you might not immediately realize about this case is that it would be great on carpet just remember to flip your power supply so that it’s got the fan intake on the top of it, because it’ll pull air in from the main compartment.
So you could totally use this case on carpet because there’s no bottom intake. That is one of the few Tower cases available today that has sufficient airflow for modern machines that actually would work in the floor next to your machine. If you are on carpet, because a lot of modern cases rely at least somewhat on air moving from the bottom of the case, so that’s nice. If you decide you’re going to do a build with one of these cases, I’d love to see it in the Forum. It’S a level one text post some pictures, maybe I’ll retweet it or comment on it or if you have any ideas or I missed something or whatever, let’s chat there, forum.levelantext.com I’m little this level, one I’m signing out. You can find me in the forums.
Thank you. .