Fractal Design ERA ITX chassis review

PC Cases and Modding 227 Page 6 of 10 Published by

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So here is where we start building the PC. First things first we need to screw in the standoffs for the motherboard. And yeah look at the width, touching 12 inches. With everything you do you need to think about clearances, so here are a few pointers:

  • Your PSU can be 20cm in length, but that includes cable connectors. 
  • Your graphics card max length is 295mm but 210/190 mm with low-mounted SFX/ATX PSU (!)
  • Your graphics card may not be thicker than 47mm, that includes the GPU cooler.
  • Your CPU onclu cooler may not be higher than 120mm without side-mounted 3.5” HDD and 70 mm recommended (91 mm max) with side-mounted HDD.
So for a CPU cooler, a low profile one is mandatory, obviously, it would be better to install a 240mm LCS unit, which offers that space but also adds airflow for the chimney effect at the top side. 
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Above you can see an SFX PSU installed, when you look closely you can see that to the left of it inside that bracket you can mounts two SSDs or an HDD. 

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Here in the above photo, you can see an ATX power supply, you move the bracket up top, however that will limit the space for your CPU cooler, here LCS pretty much is mandatory. To the right, you can see SSDs tucked away. BTW if you think, wow that is a lot of space, think again, as at the bottom your graphics card is mounted.


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Here we can see that a bit better, seriously blower-style coolers work best here as they can draw heat from the air intakes. Traditional cooler to exhaust heat into the chassis will have a harder time cooling your GPU for sure.


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Space is ample, yet there. The chimney cooling design does work quite well though, enthusiast-class graphics cards running above 200 Watt, I personally would not use. 


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