The Fractal Fan controllers are just simple passive devices with a 3-speed switch. On my Define R4 the three positions are labelled 5V, 7V and 12V First things first: I know next to nothing about what constitutes a good cooling system besides the fact that I want positive air pressure. Rear: 1 x 140mm Silent Series R2 hydraulic bearing fan, 1000 RPM speed (compatible with 120mm fans) – included

Fractal Design Brand Cases | SCAN UK Fractal Design Brand Cases | SCAN UK

It might be a little unfair, because I hid the PC on top of the sub-woofer for our 5.1 receiver. And, well, also because I took cruddy pictures with my phone.The fans have 2-pin connectors - they can only be used with the fan controller because mainboards have 3- or 4-pin connectors.

Node 304 — Fractal Design Node 304 — Fractal Design

Besides general file serving duties, primary use is to store older Photoshop / RAW files from my Lightroom catalog. Most of my photo editing work is done on my MacBook Pro (i.e. from high speed SSD), but with only 500 GB on the MBP, I have to move off older photos, which will get edited over the LAN from time to time. Media server duties will be modest - only occasional transcoding, and [almost] never to more than one device at a time. Some very light duty MySQL / web serving duties also. The problem is—I’ve gotten married since the last time I built a PC, and I really like hanging out on the couch with my wife. So, gone are the sloppy bachelor days when I could just plonk down something like an NZXT Phantom 820 in the living room. No worries, though, because this is where the Fractal Design Node 304 comes in. The Design Node 304 is an evolution of Fractal’s earlier Mini ITX NAS Case geared primarily for server duty. How well does it manage the noise and vibration of six 3.5″ drives? Can this modest 20 litre case keep the system cool enough? The final major piece to my build was a Diamond Radeon HD 7870 2GB Video Card, which fit with room to spare. This is where the concern over power supply length comes into play: Had that PSU extended much farther, or had I used a modular PSU, there might not have been enough room for this card—or a larger card, should I decide to upgrade in the future. But, this turned out fine, and as mentioned earlier the case housing offers a vent grille right next to the fan for this card. If I fully load all 8 cores and fully load the drives, temperatures stabilise at about 55 C for Mobo and 75 C for CPU. Drive temps don't changeI am building for a file / media server at home. My two key goals are that the file server can comfortably saturate a Gbps link and that energy use is as low as possible. For me this was really ok because with the middle fan speed they cooled enough while beeing very quiet. I want to build with 6 HDDs, but I am concerned that the 304 is too small and the passively cooled C27540D4I may not get sufficient airflow with all 6 drives installed. I'm also interested in any comments on typical power consumption for this build.