[section_title title=Closer Look – Interior and Installation]
Closer Look – Interior and Installation
Now it’s time for a look at the innards of this chassis. Starting with the front IO panel and intake fan. As you can see, most of the wiring from the front IO is situated in the front left hand corner of the chassis. Whilst this did make cable management a little tricky, I did manage to hide and route the majority of the cables underneath the motherboard tray. It would have been nice to have a few low profile cable management points underneath the motherboard to make this a lot easier.
Onto the opposite side we have the two hard drive racks along with a 120mm intake fan. I am not 100% sure about the implementation of these storage racks as they do take up an awful lot of room, and as you will see later on, they also stop you using a dual graphics card set up, if that is what you would want to do, or use a longer power supply. I can’t help but feel that the implementation that we saw from Antec in the ISK 600 would have been a better route for Fractal Design to go down as it would have given a lot more room to the inside of the chassis and helped to improve the airflow.
Underneath the hard drive racks you will find the mounting points and the cover for the slim slot optical bay.
Here you can see the bar that runs down the middle of the chassis to support the drive racks. This bar also adds a strengthening element to the Node 605 but it does mean that when you are installing the motherboard that you need to remove it in order to get it inside the chassis. On the far right of the picture you will see the dust filtered air intake for the power supply.
Here is the build that I managed to squeeze into the Node 605 without the hard drive racks. As you can see, without the racks there is plenty of room for dual R9 290 graphics cards as well as a longer sized power supply if that is what you would want to fit. I think you would agree, quite a potent gaming system.
As you can see below, with the hard drive racks installed, there is just no room for our second graphics card and there is only a couple of centimeters of room from the end of the power supply so if you are using a modular power supply, like I was then it is advisable to make sure that you have all the cables you need plugged in before you installed the hard drive racks into the system.
Now that you know what my thoughts are to the exterior and interior of this chassis, let’s see how its real world performance stacks up to the competition.
