So I won one of the prizes from the Hexus competition, greatly appreciated and I hope these continue .
On to the review!
Starting with the Fractal Node 804 case, I personally think cube cases are a love or hate style and I quite like them , coming from a Bitfenix prodidgy this 804 has some tough shoes to fill. For me the smaller compact cases were a good choice as I wanted my system to be portable enough for frequent lans, originally I had cases such as the Lian Li A70 and Xigamtek Elsyium so I appreciate the compactness but I do also miss the expansion!
After a very quick glance as pricing I saw it on amazon for £75 so this is the pricing I am basing my praise and criticism on.
So what does it look like ?
First impressions is that it looks great, very clean and has a fractal feel to it. The front has large piece of brushed aluminium paired with a sizeable vented mesh, it gives the case I nice break on the front while ensuring plenty of airflow is possible which is nice. The front is held in by 4 plastic pins (your average holding system), personally I found this easy but it is too easy and I feel like its going to break, I much prefer the plastic clips used on the prodigy as it came off unless I wanted it to but this is a minor niggle as ones its down it wont come off (just dont pull it from the front!). The panel IO is good, 2 USB 3.0 ports and the standard HD audio mic and output along with a power button that has little play on it and relatively nice however you may have noticed there is a lack of a reset button... im not sure why this isnt present and personally I like both buttons but maybe this is just a dying mentality, I can live without it though.
Taking the front panel off you can see mounting designed for 2x120mm fans per side with fan filters provided, now this looks good but there clearly has been a major oversight when implementing these fan filters, its so simple but I dont know how this was missed, the fan filters slide out but the tab is at the bottom and all the plastic lugging to hold them in place is implemented so you have to pull the whole fan filter down to get it out but of course if your system is sat on any surface like you normally would then you have to physically lift up the whole unit just so you can create a whole fan filter length sized gap at the bottom, either I am being stupid or someone needs a slap at fractal for leaving this detail... the whole mounting of the fan filter simply needs to be flipped so you pull the tab up and out instead of down and out.
(the tab in question...)
On from that you have a nice space for 2x 2.5mm drives on the front, I like this as its a great feature and exactly like the one done on the Bitfenix prodigy so I feel this is meant to be a basic feature for cases now a days , there are two holes that allow you to pass cables through allowing easier management. You will also see the room for mounting a slot drive to the front, I like this idea but I havent found any slot drives on the cheap so I wont be using this unfortunately, it would have been better if they simply implemented room for a slim laptop drive as its similar (maybe charge this as a £5 extra to have it pre cut etc). Other issue was the fact the power LED was very poorly glued down, first time I opened the panel it just fell off so I had to use a hot glue gun to put it in place, must have slipped through QC .
Overall fairly good standard front panel.
The top panel, this pretty much a standard meshed top panel with what appears to be a dust filter type material (maybe for noise reduction more than anything), comes off fairly easily and it has a very simply mounting method which is two mounting holes and these line up with the front panels 2 large locating pins, then you screw it down at the back, does the job however I think mine came slightly compromised as one of the locating holes appears to be on the verge of snapping off which is rather annoying but I will just try and avoid taking the top off so much.
(top panel mesh)
(top without cover)
The actual top of the case gives you plenty of options, you can install 4x120mm (or 140mm at a push) fans, the hard drive cages are easily removable, 2 small screws per rail and there are 3 on the right so give you the room to install something on the top. The hard drive cages mount the drive vertically which is interesting and does make it slightly harder to hide cables (I am terrible at this anyway... no difference ha) also no tool less design but at least the vibration washers are pre-installed, really though I think fractal missed out on an opportunity here as they could have made them horizontal mounting and then they could have brought the hard drive cages further down from the top allowing you to have fans installed along with both cages.
(hdd cage mounting)
Now the right section (if looking from the front) has plenty of space available including the two HDD cages which house 4 drives each.
The PSU sits at the bottom with a fan filter and you have two large velcro straps built into the front which I can only assume is meant to be a really simple way of managing the cables or as the manual suggestions, you can place one of the HDD bays in there and strap it down, I like this small feature its nice. There is a very large cut out for the motherboard which is great, for my mini-itx motherboard it even allows me to feed the 24pin power cable right there to minimise mess, there are several cut outs in places to allow easy feeding of cables, they are well sized and suitably positioned however I would have liked for the larger cut outs to have rubber grommets to make it easier to hide cables but again this is a minor niggle.
(right side with PSU installed)
(left section)
The left side holds the motherboard and other components, its pretty spacious especially when working with a mini-itx board. It allows for 320mm GPUs but that is without a fan or anything at the front, as soon as you add in components at the front you are eating into this space, with the supplied fan it goes to 290mm space which is still enough to house all single GPUs as far as I am aware, the 290x is 278mm stock but obviously if a third party has moved components or cooling to extend past the PCB it maybe problematic.
Not much else to say on the left side, the PCI panels are white which is a nice break but its pretty much your standard case ,
Installed my motherboard and GPU pretty easily, was worried about the GPU not fitting due to it being so high up but no problems there . While we are in this section there is a basic fan controller built in, it has a L/M/H setting on the rear of the case and the connections are just above the fan, it has three 3 pin connections available and for some reason has a sata power connector for power... really odd as everyone uses molex for fan controllers right? Heres another niggle for me, why I cant get any sata cables over to that place as I used all mine to power the 2 SSDs in the front and one HDD in the left compartment, it would have been better if they put the controller in the right section as that would have meant the fan controller was right next to the power and all you would need to route is the three fan cables, personal perference I guess but seems a bit silly to put it up in the left section where not many power cables are!
Now as a water cooling enthusiast I have had watercooling for about 6 years now, the prodigy did me well at condensing my setup while maximising watercooling performance as I had an XSPC RX240 and an RS240 all in one case for a simple CPU + GPU loop, worked extremely well so with the promise of great watercooling support I went to investigate the actual options. In the right compartment I could easily fit the RX240 in the roof but I couldnt fit it in the front as its apparently too tall , would have been amazing if I could have put it in the front but still one of the thickest radiators( its like 3 times the thickness of the S24 radiator...) in the top is good. Onto the left section I found an immediate issue with the roof installation of a slim radiator, the motherboard is too high up so there is no room to safely mount it as it would block the CPU connections along with the fact my motherboard has a VRM riser card means its an unexpected obstacle at the beginning of the motherboard , still can get a 240mm radiator in the front of it but again you're taking vital space away from the GPU length, with the Kelvin s24 installed in the front I can fit my 7950 in but its down to like 2 mm spare and thats a 275mm card so i think that specific raditor pushes out the option of a longer GPu (obviously sacrificing one Fan will claim the space back). Overall the watercooling posibilities seem very strong for what is an MATX/Mitx case and is comparable with my prodigy.
Summary, the build quality of the case is fairly good but in some places there is a bit too much flex and the paint seems to come off very easily however the case is extremely spacious and allows for good cable management, I am happy with this case and I think £75 is an okay price for it right now but I would prefer to see it closer to the £60 mark. Not sure whate lse to say with regards to the case so lets move onto the Kelvin S24.