Fractal Design Node 605 Case Review: Is Fractal Design Ready for Primetime?

Noise and Thermal Testing, Dedicated GPUs

The Fractal Design Node 605 is capable of offering at least a passable performance with our bone stock mITX testbed, but it's really not leaving the end user much headroom to upgrade. Now we're going to add dedicated graphics cards to the mix: the sub-75W Zotac GeForce GTS 450 Eco, and the more robust ASUS GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Unfortunately, you'll see the Node 605's fortunes don't really improve.

Add in a video card and thermals go straight to hell. Even the high fan setting can't seem to salvage it, and our SSD is producing some of the hottest temperatures we've yet recorded. You can see the GTS 450 Eco typically runs pretty cool, but in the Node 605 it's hotter than we've ever seen it, and heat seems to be getting trapped between the card and the CPU.

Fan speeds are up there, too. Nothing in the Node 605 is actually overheating, but it's clear this case's cooling design needs to go back to the drawing board.

The Node 605 is able to at least run quieter than a lot of the competition, but embarassingly the substantially smaller Node 304 continues to offer superior performance across the board.

The Fractal Design Node 605 was already having issues with a modest card like the Zotac GTS 450 Eco, so you can probably guess how things went with the GTX 560 Ti installed.

Thermals shoot through the roof. Even with the fan set to high, the Node 605 is beaten in every test. Again, nothing is overheating (except possibly the SSD, which reported a high temperature of a blistering 51C), but it's clear the Node 605 isn't very efficient at moving heat.

Fan speed measurements just reiterate what we already know: the Node 605 has very limited thermal headroom, and it's having trouble competing with cases half its size.

With this much of a thermal load placed on it, the Node 605 just can't stay quiet.

During testing I actually ran the system with the top panel open to make sure the fans were spinning, and they were, even on the lowest setting. The problem was that you could barely feel any air coming off of them, and this translated to a poor showing in testing.