this good people is finally something fresh and different from fractal design
the era ITX enclosure it's unlike anything we've seen from them yet and a
new ITX case on the market is always exciting especially from a company that
tries to cater to the mainstream and at the same time enthusiasts builds to and
that's what era is all about I've spent the last two days working with this case
and it's not exactly what I expected given the mission statement for this
project as you'll see later on it still faces all the traditional challenges of
NES fffff a lot of NES ffs and closure power up your PC with be quite straight
power Levin platinum series featuring 80 plus platinum efficiency a fully modular
design high quality Japanese capacitors and a silent wingspan that's optimized
for air flow and silence choose be quiet and your components will thank you
alright so first of all we have a five different color options they're all
pretty unique and this is with a full aluminum exterior plus TG and wood
panels for the top i've been patiently waiting for wood integrations on more pc
cases and it's finally here with a metal base plate and careful construction so
the wood doesn't warp over time because of temperature fluctuations this also
means what top plates will be unique to each case but they're only available on
the silver and gray models while the more colorful versions get at eg panel
up top and this blue one in particular looks quite elegant and very bright one
note about the TG panels they will be thinner because the wood ones are
actually quite thick and therefore the TG side of things should allow for more
airflow so you're looking to spend a hundred and fifty nine dollars on the
era ITX regardless of color which is in line with other ITX cases but still
pricey outside of the SFF bubble I love the curvature of the chassis and the
ventilation pattern it is quite a departure from their defined series but
it's not a small enclosure by any means that's 16 litres it is larger than the
latest h1 and also because it's not a vertical tower it does take up more desk
space all the aluminum edges on my sample are refined and I haven't noticed
any quality concerns on the frame and that have no issues displaying this case
in my living room or at my main space we've got a good eye oh with the type C
Gen 2 USB 3 ports and the con but audio jack and you'll also notice
there are no thumb screws anywhere around the body and that is because the
side panels are completely - lists that's it on four pegs with these rubber
grommets on the bottom while the top plates are magnetic so you can simply
swap out the solid piece with the mesh one and literally two seconds but the
wood panels looks just so much nicer anyway I would say keep the wood on top
but maybe not as you'll see later the ventilation on both side panels is
covered with a dust filter so are the small strips at the bottom and that is
the only part of the frame that is not aluminum or steel it is actually plastic
and in that cavity that is where your graphics card will breathe breathe now
here's the interior it's kind of interesting to see fractal focus heavily
on storage power supply compatibility and water cooling support so for example
for storage options this vertical bracket can mount doulas as these or a
single three and a half inch drive but since it's above the socket CPU tower
clearance is limited to 120 millimeters with nothing on a bracket or 70 million
is recommended with a hard drive installed then we also have an internal
drive cage attached to an SFX bracket that lets you either mount a single hard
drive or dual SSDs now the case supports full-size ATX power supplies along with
SFX and SF XL and you can see the two psu brackets on the right there with the
vertical mount system so you can move your power supply up and down depending
on your hardware but because the second drive bracket is attached to the SFX
power supply bracket if you are installing an ATX unit you are
essentially limiting your storage capacity to only that vertical bracket
and then for water cooling you can now take 240 rad at the top or dual 120 on
the radiators - and because the bracket is installed from above wider radiators
will not fit also the top fan bracket can only be installed one way as it
appears to be symmetrical but doesn't actually align with the mounting holes
so keep that in mind but with an ATX power supply only 120 rad is supported
so era ITX is most optimal with an SF x power supply because you're not
sacrificing on the radiator storage above you're not eliminating that
additional drive bracket if you're gonna use it and it's also much easier for
cable management when you don't have the massive ATX procore power
supply that's also entering into your GPU space when it comes to cable
management furthermore you can install dual 140mm fans at the bottom as long as
you use a single slot GPU or don't use one at all and there are no 120mm mounts
at the bottom because that will close off the already limited space to breathe
for your graphics card and finally our rear exhaust fan is an 80 millimeter fan
running at 1600 rpm so for my configuration I went with a 240 AAA or
at the top and SFX L power supply with slim cables and our TX 2060 super that
is nicely compact so first of all there is no room behind the motherboard tray
to route cables or anything that isn't super slim anyway so everything is
pretty much internal I am very happy to see a Type C cable that is flexible and
not bulky but managing all the cables exiting the power supply area is quite
difficult as in my case they start to mingle with my GPU space so in a perfect
scenario you have 295 millimeters of clearance for the GPU and you can even
remove the front IO cover if that gets in your way and even though the side
panels are mostly solid cable management is still not a strong suit for the era
ITX which brings us the most surprising and disappointing part of this review
cooling and let me remind you of their optimal airflow mission statement for
this project which is definitely not the case here so get this the gorgeous solid
top panel which is probably why I would want to buy this case the first place is
not adequately spaced out to exhaust air and this heats up the system very fast
as you can see luckily the mesh top helps with cooling the CPU but our
graphics card is still struggling for air removing all panels you can see
another drastic drop in CPU temperature but the graphics chamber is so poorly
ventilated it absolutely kills any desire for me to actually use this in
the future and just for reference I removed the bottom plastic cover raise
the case a little bit and my temperatures finally got acceptable so
the culprit here is a poorly designed bottom frame that just cannot breathe
and completely chokes your graphics card here's how air compares to the NZXT h1
with the same hardware but a smaller AIO very surprised that even still we get
better cooling inside the h1 on all fronts and so the takeaway here is that
we have this beautiful aluminum wood or tempered glass enclosure that actually
gives users options in terms of hardware configurations but completely sabotages
on cooling I would buy the case with the white oak or walnut top but then you're
penalized for air flow and I would not want to use a low-profile CPU cooler and
therefore I would have to go with a mesh design in case I want to mount radiator
up top they did not want to raise the top panel above the actual frame to keep
it within design characteristics but in doing so you completely sabotage calling
for the GPU and the CPU when you want the case to look pretty furthermore GPU
temps are bad and cleaning cables inside this thing is a bit of a mess but the
thing is I understand the flexibility behind trying to please all types of
users but I think when it comes to ITX focus is priority and is more important
having said that I hope to see more wood integrations on cases in the future and
I think fractal is definitely going to push that whole momentum forward but
this isn't the wood for me all right guys I'm Dimitri thank so much for
watching check out this other relevant content subscribe for more and I'll talk
to you next week