The Fractal Design Pop Case: A Review of Quality and Price

In this review, we'll take a closer look at the Fractal Design Pop case, a modern take on the classic case design. With its high build quality, cable management features, and RGB lighting capabilities, the Pop seems like an excellent option for PC builders looking for a reliable and stylish case.

The Pop's build quality is one of its standout features, with a focus on modern standards such as dust filters, cable ties, and a sleek design that makes it easy to work inside. The case also boasts a range of features designed to enhance airflow and cooling, including fans in the top rear and front, which can be customized to suit individual needs.

One area where the Pop excels is in its price point. At $80, it's significantly cheaper than similar cases on the market, making it an attractive option for budget-conscious builders. However, as prices continue to rise, the Pop's value proposition begins to erode, and it may no longer be competitive with other options.

Despite some minor issues, such as the lack of support for certain Motherboard form factors, the Pop is a solid case that checks all the right boxes for PC builders. Its build quality, cable management features, and RGB lighting capabilities make it an excellent choice for those looking to upgrade their system or start from scratch.

In comparison to other cases in its price range, the Pop stands out as a high-quality option with a focus on modern design and features. While not perfect, it's clear that Fractal Design has put a lot of thought into creating a case that meets the needs of PC builders today.

One area where the Pop falls short is in terms of fan quality. The included fans are decent but may not provide enough airflow for more powerful systems. However, this can be mitigated by upgrading to higher-quality fans or adding additional fans to the top rear and front of the case.

Another potential issue with the Pop is its tendency to create a " listing chaos" if Fractal Design decides to offer too many SKUs at once. With 20 different variants available, it may become difficult for buyers to determine which one they want, and the complexity could lead to issues with performance and compatibility.

To make the most of the Pop's potential, we recommend adding additional fans to improve airflow and cooling. By doing so, you can create a more stable and efficient system that takes full advantage of the case's features.

In terms of competition, the Fractal Design Pop is one of several cases in its price range that offer similar quality and features. However, some cases may have an edge when it comes to specific design elements or thermal performance.

One notable competitor is the NZXT H510 Flow, which offers a more extensive range of customization options but may be overkill for some builders. Another option is the Corsair Crystal 460X RGB, which boasts a sleek and modern design but may not offer the same level of airflow and cooling as the Pop.

Ultimately, the Fractal Design Pop is a solid case that checks all the right boxes for PC builders looking for a reliable and stylish system. While it may have some minor issues, its high build quality, cable management features, and RGB lighting capabilities make it an excellent choice for those in the market for a new case.

As always, we recommend doing your research and reading multiple reviews before making a purchase. With so many great cases on the market, there's bound to be one that meets your specific needs and budget.

We also want to thank you for watching and supporting us on our journey. If you're interested in learning more about PC hardware or have questions about any of the products we review, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can find us on social media at @store.cameras.net, where we offer a range of exclusive content and discounts.

Additionally, if you'd like to support our channel directly, we offer a range of merchandise options, including mouse pads with custom designs that showcase our unique style. These mouse pads are available in blue, black, red, and black with custom in-house designs, and they make a great addition to any PC setup.

Finally, we're proud to be part of the Patreon community at patreon.com/gamersnexus, where you can get exclusive behind-the-scenes content, updates on our latest projects, and other perks that show our appreciation for your support. Thank you again for watching, and we'll see you all next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe've never seen a case company launch with this many skus at the same time but fractal has its new pop case app that we're reviewing today this one although we have another we're going to be getting and they have a lot of different color variations that's the main gimmick for this one so the new freckle pop 90 case comes in a few different sizes and it has a total of 14 skus that fractal told us about but when we started counting it on our own this one chassis design actually has about 20 skus 20 different variations and that's because of the color variance plus there's xl nano and standard and then there's also silent and airflow and we think they're trying to compete with this the height y60 so fractal's a new 90 pop including the pop air and silent with its color variations on the bench for review today let's see how it does before that this video is sponsored by lynnode lynnote is a linux server hosting provider that gn has used for nearly a decade now for its own servers alongside dedicated website hosting linux makes it easy to cut out third-party vpn services to build your own vpn that you fully control easily configured via the interface lenoda also has hundreds of guides for custom servers including game server apps like rust minecraft cs go and guides to host your own video calling servers to eliminate third parties linux is a great way to take back control of software and your hosting and gamers nexus viewers get a 100 credit for 60 days on new accounts at lino.com gamersnexus or click the link below so today we are working on reviewing mostly the pop air rgb there's the non-rgb version too performance should be identical with the rgb variant it's basically just a color change and our options were white black cyan magenta orange and green for the color accents on the cases we went with we have a silent version here of the pop and uh obviously white for this one and then we went with cyan for this one so fractal sent to over this option matches our colors a little bit but in terms of performance that the color does not in fact make it colder just because it's blue so okay so here it is the color is a bit unusual and whenever a company does different colors for their cases it tells us they're a little more committed to the design than typically because basically a black case and white for the most part those will sell probably upwards of 90 of the units depending on the case design so color historically has not done much other than add additional complexity like with the old ndxc phantom cases so we start seeing it make a comeback with the y60 it's really cool to see that because you get some different variations in the mix and for this one fractal's basically done a couple of accents throughout the case so you have a matte paint internally for the cyan or magenta or whatever color you go with and then uh externally there's a couple highlights but they they really haven't gone too heavy with it so you can see the motherboard frame has got this matte cyan or blue color there's some blue on the legs for the case down here now these are not paint as far as we can tell it's actually blue plastic so we took a knife and we did a big gouge in one of these feet and the end result is that it didn't chip off so it is actually just blue all the way through on the top there's blue for the i o unfortunately there's also a blank plug labeled usbc with no usbc so either you could view it as they're shipping you an incomplete case that you have to then pay 10 extra later to complete or you could view it as they're passing on the savings to you but just something to be aware of it is it's labeled if you look at the photos you'll see usbc there it doesn't come with it that's separate purchase so in terms of the other stuff performance wise it comes with the same three fans you're seeing here it's got two 120s in the front one 120 in the rear we have all the thermal and noise tests coming up a little bit later as usual with different configurations including a frontless configuration and then it's so dangerous the front has this thing on it we'll talk about that in a little bit and it's got this hex design panel on it for the air model which is what we're looking at today as opposed to the silent model over here texturally the silent model has or well just i guess the front panel on it anyway has this interesting almost almost wrap like texture it feel if you have a google stadia controller and you don't because nobody bought those then it feels like that does that help i hope so probably not someone's writing a comment right now saying that they feel personally attacked about their stadium purchase so this case the mid tower we're reviewing fit and finish is up to fractal standard for the most part we have a couple comments we'll be making especially up here later on but you can see the color goes all the way to the back and for the front mesh panel fractal used a new hexagon and triangle pattern combined with a very corsair e triangular ventilation pattern elsewhere in the case we liked it when corsair did it and we like it here too although we wish fractal hadn't chosen to randomly fill in some of the triangles it's subtle but it's hard to unsee it's like a less extreme version of the corsair 220t airflow's front panel in general the case looks less flashy and more business-like than the meshfy 2 line which is why we would gravitate more towards the colorful variants now to the interesting part the five and a quarter base this case can fit two of them that's very rare at this point it comes with this nice little secret compartment you can put stuff in uh or you can put two optical drives there so that makes it a little unique because right now to get two optical drives we checked and the newest stuff that we've reviewed that makes sense for it would maybe be a fractal defined 7xl which is large or something like a be quiet dark bass pro 900 v2 that would also fit optical drives the door is designed to open with a fabric pull tab although it got knocked off pretty much every single time we picked up the case and to fill the rarely used space frackle has installed what looks like but is definitely not an ashtray in one of the slots it fit in perfectly with the supercomputers of the 70s this tray could be used for storing screws but we'd caution against the temptation because transporting at once and forgetting their presence might result in a bad spill installing an optical drive eats up a lot of space under the power supply shroud and it requires removing one of the hard drive brackets but it's possible to have one optical drive and one three and a half inch hard drive under the shroud at the same time shorter five and a quarter devices like lcds might fit without removing anything it just depends on what it is opening the magnetic door every time you want to get your dvd drive or your fan controller is annoying obviously but that's a familiar problem from the optical drive days of your and something we've encountered many times just not recently three and a half inch support is limited to two drives because only two brackets are included but as usual with fractal cases you can purchase an additional bracket up to three total supported and these brackets can each hold one three and a half and one two and a half inch drive simultaneously two mounts are located under the shroud and one behind the motherboard tray at the front of the case so we immediately run into also the limitations of optical drives on cases and mostly why they went away if you look at this because of the presence of optical drive support the entire front bottom of the case down here it's useless because it's all caging for that stuff and so there's nothing really else for fractal to do with this except for extend the power splash route all the way to the front because they have no other use for that space except for making visible the ugly caging for hard drives or optical drives so that's why they've run it up front now we have always had issues with power supply shrouds because they uh they're problematic for cooling performance of a gpu you pretty much always have better performance without the shroud here but it's a trade-off of hiding your cables sacrificing a couple of degrees sometimes it's a lot worse if you're running a micro atx case for example or like the nano version of this where the shroud is suddenly within an inch or two of the gpu that's bad especially when you're in the era of three slot gpus because now it's effectively the same as pushing it right up against the glass so they have their downsides and that's one of the criticisms we've had of these for a long time but fractal runs this all the way to the front and because of that you end up with unusable mounting space at the front of the case where those fans are which means if we pull these radiators out you'll see the limitations so the maximum limitation of the radiator support that was ambitious is uh 280 millimeters on the front this is a 240 rad and there is sufficient clearance to get it tubes oriented down but if you look in here the screw rails here they stop at the top of the shroud of course so this could just barely fit a 360 if that shroud weren't there but then you wouldn't have the optical drive support so it's sort of one or the other whether or not it was a worthwhile sacrifice for the most part um a lot of cases already cut the shroud short and run a 360. so this at least makes fractal a little more unique and we think that is worth doing for some design variants in the market now putting a 240 in here you can do up top but this is about the maximum size they really stop short on pulling the top radiator mount forward you can see if we look at the top of the case up here it stops very early they don't bring it all the way out and so it does mean that the chance of having an accidental incompatible set of two radiators is very low so that's nice but it also severely restricts how much you can put in the case and if you look at this this thing doesn't even have fans on it right now and we're already running very close to the motherboard which is largely the reason that they cut this short because going up in size to like a 280 or something you're gonna run right up against the board and that'll be a problem for vrm heatsinks so component clearance prevents the installation of 280 ml top radiators and fractal has included an offset mounting kit to make it easier to fit 240 models this mounting kit came in its own bag with its own instructions which really makes it look like a last minute addition or afterthought to correct an error now as for cable management we didn't have any trouble with cable storage but that's because we didn't install any three and a half inch or five and a quarter inch drives every inch of the pop air is covered in optional mounting locations and using them means more cables and fewer places to put them the one place where we did run into a problem was with the cutout under the very bottom rear corner of the motherboard which is partially obstructed by an atx power supply now for io on this they didn't go too minimalistic like we see sometimes where it starts to actually just get incredibly annoying and this one there's two usb 3.0 ports on the top type a there's a microphone and a headphone three and a half millimeter jack an rgb adjust that you could rewire if you wanted to power obviously and then the unfortunately blanked out usb type-c connector are these run a little expensive we actually did a factory tour of one of these factories in the past and they uh hand wire all of the wires into the header which is part of why it's so expensive so unfortunate that is an extra ten dollars if you want to buy it they actually have a whole list of extra add-ons you can buy so there's a gpu mounting kit if you want to get a vertical gpu in there that 46 dollars it turns the 90 case into 130 140 case you're very close to just getting even from fractal uh torrent compact which is better like a lot better so probably not worth there also unless you're water cooling the gpu it will run fairly hot in this small of a box anyway so we wouldn't recommend that they also sell a few other things that they've got a hard drive tray kit for eight dollars they have an ssd bracket kit for eight dollars the usb kit for ten dollars and sort of nickel and diming their way back into charging you more for a case basically but these days sadly 80 which is the floor price for the non-rgb one and 90 cases are not nearly as common as they used to be but there are still a lot of competitors and we're looking at those today too now for other small features it has a dust filter for the power supply not the highest quality one the plastic that forms it is large and obstructs much more space than it really needs to or has any business doing fortunately power supplies for the most part uh this is going to be sufficient for them to breathe it is not particularly uh expensive in the way it's all assembled and built as you can see we've now popped out the filter that was supposed to be permanently attached oops uh so it's okay it's fairly standard magnetic dust filter on the top fairly standard if you run exhaust on the top this you really don't need it at that point you can take it off and save yourself fractions of a degree maybe one degree celsius reduction and then the front does not have a filter but this is a good thing because uh for we've got to take the ashtray out and then we can take the front panel off so this as you can see no additional dust filtration in here they are using these very fine um mesh materials these days in a lot of cases like the fan tech series cases really popularized this and then fractal is now jumping on board with it as well where instead of using the larger steel mesh than putting an additional dash filter behind it they just do the ultra fine mesh and this is much better we've tested these with a larger mesh a dos filter sometimes they do two dash filters we've tested them like this with and without dust filters this always performs best because you are blocking the least amount of air because as soon as you put a dust filter behind it you now have like if you imagine this on it you now have the metal forming the mesh holes on the filter lining up with the holes for the actual mesh behind it for the front of the case and that blocks airflow and it really doesn't help with dust control when the holes are as fine as this so that's a good thing okay enough of my part we're going to go to patrick for a little bit to talk about some of his thoughts on the case he especially has thoughts on rgb leds whenever i run into a project where we need to start wiring rgb leds i go get patrick to do it not because he likes doing it but because i hate doing it and he and i can ask him to do it for me so anyway we're gonna ask him what he thinks about leds because this is the pop air rgb uh the cyan model one of 20 skus there is an rgb controller in here it's included with the i o it's tucked in right here it's just a little five volt three pin argb header that you can hook your daisy chained fans into and that is all the rgb in the case other than the power button up here so we can plug it in and turn it on i can hold this rgb control button here to change modes and then i can quick tap it to cycle through but you might notice as i'm cycling through here that i have rainbow i have these two colors here these two colors these two colors i don't have any solid cyan option uh this is fading through different colors here so this case comes in cyan magenta green and orange and we don't have solid color options for any of that so when i was building this i wanted to set it up so that when andrew came in to film it later it would match the colors and look like all the renders that are online but i wasn't able to do that so if you do want to match these fans to the case interior you can as usual you know just plug these this header here and your motherboard and sync it through your rgb software of choice but we'd like to see a baked in color that actually matches the case for these fractal pop air rgb units so the stock fans front and back are aspect 12 120 millimeter rgb fans uh these should be identical to the non-rgb fans that are in the silent models and the non-rgb air models um they're rated for 1200 rpm uh when i was running the tests you know it looked like that was about accurate these spun a little fast so taking a look in here you can see these fans are mounted right on the front of the chassis against the front panel they did that probably to get the leds to come through really clear you know there's nothing in the way of them you can see them very clearly we usually like to see the fans mounted back inside the chassis that gives them a better chance to pull air in across the full surface area of the mesh rather than just the area right in front of them it shouldn't matter too much in this instance i'd like to see them inside the chassis as well just because it makes it a lot easier to access the screws getting in here with the screwdriver once all the system is built in here is pretty difficult so taking a look at the other side here these fans each have 500 millimeter cables on them which normally would be perfectly adequate but the way the cutouts are placed here the stock cable routing makes it so that the fan cables are just a little short to reach all areas of the motherboard the fans can be daisy chains together and it seems like maybe that's what fractal wants you to do we plugged in a fan extension here just because these cables can't quite reach at the bottom uh this would be kind of asking a lot to get into headers at the bottom edge here that covers the fans and leds and uh i'll throw it back to steve to finish out the build section a couple of other small things in here before we jump into the thermals and the noise for this so side panel attachment is simple and secure it uses captive screws we'd like to see a handle on the glass side panel like the one on the metal panel just to help avoid fingerprints because they get everywhere but that's a relatively minor issue the front panel can theoretically be pulled off with a handle on the bottom but as you saw it's a little difficult sometimes it makes sense at this price point overall but this thing it just doesn't compare well to the hinged easy access doors and a removable radiator brackets we've seen on some of the other fractal cases higher up in price point as it is though it's difficult to access the screws for the stock fans with the system built in the case and the accessibility overall is somewhat limited just by the nature of the design especially accommodating the five and a quarter base now for some thermal tests stock thermal testing has been a weak point for some fractal cases in the past even the meshify models when they've been under-supplied with stock fans although you could fix that the pop the non-mini and the non-xl comes with a reasonable set of three stock fans which may be enough to solve that problem our torture test is a full system cpu and gpu load showing just some fractal cases first this workload raised the cpu temperature to 47 degrees celsius above ambient which dropped to 43 degrees when we removed the front panel the pop airs a single layer of mesh sands backing filter allows this result that shows relatively low obstruction by the panel the torrent remains a clear and obvious leader especially in price with the meshfy 2 compact performing mostly similarly to the pop era rgb onto the comparative charts assuming the pop goes on sale for the stated 80 to 90 dollars there's not much in our current lineup of favorites that can be considered a direct competitor prices have risen the 4000 d airflow is currently 105 in most listings while the p400a digital is 110 both are competitive but obviously more expensive the nzxt h510 flow and the montaq x3 mesh are the closest semi-recent matches to the pop air's price and market but we'll use the more expensive h7 flow for comparison instead because the h510 flow kind of sucks and we weren't big fans of it the x3 averaged 47 degrees in this test tied with the pop air while the h7 flow was slightly warmer at 48 degrees the pop is above average overall in the same torture test the average gb temperature was 57 degrees above ambient which dropped slightly to 56 degrees with the removal of the front panel not enough to be outside the margin of error but a little bit of movement both the front and the back of the case are well ventilated but the full length power supply shroud is what's limiting the cooling potential here at the bottom of the case where the gpu really needs it the x3 pulled ahead here with a 52 degree average but its claim to fame is that it comes with six stock fans so high performance should be expected as a sacrifice the x3's overall build quality is far inferior to fractals so where it makes up some room and thermals it loses ground elsewhere the h7 flow also performed well at 53 degrees above ambient this is one instance though where installing fraxel's vertical gpu riser could help performance in some situations giving the gpu more room to breathe but it really depends on the size of the video card as we said earlier in many situations it could easily make things worse you'll just have to size it up based on how fat of a video card you bought the pop aeris gpu cooling isn't dangerously bad but among the current wave of high airflow cases these results are warm for sure some larger fans would help if you stick around for the standardized fan testing at the end you'll see some of those results the average gpu temperature during a gpu heavy fire strike extreme stress test was nearly identical to the original torture test result at 57 degrees that doesn't place it any higher on the charge with the x3 and the h7 flow still beating it at 55 degrees and 52 degrees respectively moving on to the blender test rendering our monkey head testing on the cpu resulted in a cpu average of 36 degrees above ambient that puts the pop air back in the saddle within margin of error of the h7 flow and the x3's tight average of 35 degrees cpu cooling and the pop air is good out of the box switching to gpu only rendering for the scene without the cpu doing much of anything the gpu average was 25 degrees over ambient the deltas are less extreme here than in the torture test because it's a lighter workload but the pop air is about two degrees warmer than the h7 flow and the x3 which are nearly tied moving to our larger and higher performance set of standardized fans improved thermals across the board with a new cpu average of 42 degrees beating the h7 flow's 44 degree average the x3 is effectively out of the running without the benefit of its six stock fans averaging 51 degrees remember that standardizing fans is primarily an academic exercise here but it was one that was highly requested by you all this is useful when comparing cases where we normalize against one set but it takes away other fair advantages from cases like the tort the gpu average dropped to 52 degrees closer to the middle of the pack although the h7 flow still won here with a 50 degree average the montaq x3 managed to tie at 52 degrees if you want a pop air rgb it may make sense to buy a pop air and supply some larger rgb fans with the three stock fans running at 100 the pop air's noise level as measured with our standardized setup was 39.4 dba that's on par with the h7 flow we found that the stock fans in our review unit ran a little faster than the advertised 1200 rpm typically between 1300 and 1400 rpm but that's within the normal 10 manufacturing variants as we mentioned earlier fractal is also releasing silent versions of the pop cases but we probably won't test those in the future lowering the case's noise level to 36 dba for the threshold we use for testing required setting fan speeds to 80 or about 1100 rpm this reduction is smaller than we usually have to make and there was little effect on cpu temperature which climbed to 48 degrees over ambient it stayed ahead of the h7 flows 50 degree average while the x3 is completely disqualified by virtue of not having adjustable fan speeds at all the gpu average climbed to an unpleasant 59 degrees over ambient handily beaten by the h7 flows 54 degrees if you're trying to tune the fan speeds in the pop keep a careful eye on the gpu temperature more so than the cpu that goes double for the less ventilated silent thermals so wrapping it all up then first of all the pro error is definitely an easy choice for at least one type of user and that's somebody who wants a five and a quarter bay in a modern case anyway this is it this is about the best five and a quarter bay implementation we've seen basically ever just because it stopped and so it never advanced so uh defines seven things like that large cases it's not abnormal for them to have one or to have one you can hack your way into a five and a quarter bay on the case but this is one of the better ones we've seen especially on a smaller case that's modern it's high build quality modern standards for cable management things like that so that's the easy part now in terms of the look the build quality and the hardware compatibility the pop seems like a case that should cost more than eighty dollars these days uh this it looks about right for eighty dollars about three or four years ago but today this is higher quality than probably most cases in that 80 90 range for the the rgb version are are able to compete with so that's a good thing for fractal it does put them on better footing than say the montec x3 which is much much lower build quality even though it's competitive thermally it's also on fairly competitive footing with the h510 flow which we don't particularly like anyway there's just not a lot below 100 these days in cases so the landcool 215 used to be a 70 to 80 case that would be our go-to recommendation in the pops price point if it were still there but right now and we just checked it was a hundred dollars so if fractal can hold to the msrp for at least a little while then the papa error starts to make a lot more sense if it climbs in price it's not really competitive enough unless you're looking for the aesthetic specifically like or different colored interiors things you can't really get elsewhere that would be its main staying power if the price creeps so we're definitely not looking forward to the listing chaos that will be created with 20 different skus on new ag or amazon or wherever if you want one of the cases and you don't see it in the stock probably check one of the other sku listings because it's going to be a nightmare in terms of performance the popular could definitely do better the price leaves a room to budget for some better fans so you're able to make it work couple suggestions here so as is the case with most chassis that have uh top fan ports if you're doing any cooler really but especially an air cooler and you mount a couple of fans to the top because you're thinking well gn said the thermals could be better i'm gonna add some fans if you just add two fans to the top and you put one of them up here before the fan for the air cooler what will happen is that it will come in the front of the case and then it'll leave it's never gonna hit the cooler so it won't really make it better what you could do though is either replace the fans with higher quality ones or you could add a fan just in the top rear as exhaust that would make sense or you could put it in the top front as intake there's no reason you can't do that you might want to do both as intake and then you basically got a really strong positive pressure set up and the air is going to come out the back including these holes down here where it's heavily ventilated in the pcie slot and near the gpu so that may be something to look into if you want to build one of these cases it would help get some more air through the system historically ndxt has been one of fractal's closest competitors same for fantax really at least now with the designs they're doing today hopefully ndxc will launch a sub h7 tier case sometime soon that isn't the h510 flow but for now the h7 is sort of the the main competitor from ndxt fantax you should look at the p400a the big thing there though it's a competitive case and thermally it does very well but the p400a is an ancient case like tooling internally and you notice it so uh this overall we'd say is sort of in that group of cases where we recommend it right now the 80 to 90 dollar price class it's pretty rare and uh if fractal can hold then there's a good spot as soon as it jumps to a hundred dollars though our recommendation shifts to be you should look at the other cases on the market because there's a lot of them at 100 to 110 right now so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.cameras.net it helps out directly you can grab one of the mouse mats like i have on the table here in front of me for a dust sized mousing service we have them in blue and black and red and black with fully custom in-house designs and a lot of effort going into things like the custom color rubber underside the stitching at the borders things like that or patreon.com gamers nexus where you can get a bonus post for some behind-the-scenes updates what we're working on right now i wrote a big one up and posted it the other day so thank you for watching and supporting we'll see you all next timewe've never seen a case company launch with this many skus at the same time but fractal has its new pop case app that we're reviewing today this one although we have another we're going to be getting and they have a lot of different color variations that's the main gimmick for this one so the new freckle pop 90 case comes in a few different sizes and it has a total of 14 skus that fractal told us about but when we started counting it on our own this one chassis design actually has about 20 skus 20 different variations and that's because of the color variance plus there's xl nano and standard and then there's also silent and airflow and we think they're trying to compete with this the height y60 so fractal's a new 90 pop including the pop air and silent with its color variations on the bench for review today let's see how it does before that this video is sponsored by lynnode lynnote is a linux server hosting provider that gn has used for nearly a decade now for its own servers alongside dedicated website hosting linux makes it easy to cut out third-party vpn services to build your own vpn that you fully control easily configured via the interface lenoda also has hundreds of guides for custom servers including game server apps like rust minecraft cs go and guides to host your own video calling servers to eliminate third parties linux is a great way to take back control of software and your hosting and gamers nexus viewers get a 100 credit for 60 days on new accounts at lino.com gamersnexus or click the link below so today we are working on reviewing mostly the pop air rgb there's the non-rgb version too performance should be identical with the rgb variant it's basically just a color change and our options were white black cyan magenta orange and green for the color accents on the cases we went with we have a silent version here of the pop and uh obviously white for this one and then we went with cyan for this one so fractal sent to over this option matches our colors a little bit but in terms of performance that the color does not in fact make it colder just because it's blue so okay so here it is the color is a bit unusual and whenever a company does different colors for their cases it tells us they're a little more committed to the design than typically because basically a black case and white for the most part those will sell probably upwards of 90 of the units depending on the case design so color historically has not done much other than add additional complexity like with the old ndxc phantom cases so we start seeing it make a comeback with the y60 it's really cool to see that because you get some different variations in the mix and for this one fractal's basically done a couple of accents throughout the case so you have a matte paint internally for the cyan or magenta or whatever color you go with and then uh externally there's a couple highlights but they they really haven't gone too heavy with it so you can see the motherboard frame has got this matte cyan or blue color there's some blue on the legs for the case down here now these are not paint as far as we can tell it's actually blue plastic so we took a knife and we did a big gouge in one of these feet and the end result is that it didn't chip off so it is actually just blue all the way through on the top there's blue for the i o unfortunately there's also a blank plug labeled usbc with no usbc so either you could view it as they're shipping you an incomplete case that you have to then pay 10 extra later to complete or you could view it as they're passing on the savings to you but just something to be aware of it is it's labeled if you look at the photos you'll see usbc there it doesn't come with it that's separate purchase so in terms of the other stuff performance wise it comes with the same three fans you're seeing here it's got two 120s in the front one 120 in the rear we have all the thermal and noise tests coming up a little bit later as usual with different configurations including a frontless configuration and then it's so dangerous the front has this thing on it we'll talk about that in a little bit and it's got this hex design panel on it for the air model which is what we're looking at today as opposed to the silent model over here texturally the silent model has or well just i guess the front panel on it anyway has this interesting almost almost wrap like texture it feel if you have a google stadia controller and you don't because nobody bought those then it feels like that does that help i hope so probably not someone's writing a comment right now saying that they feel personally attacked about their stadium purchase so this case the mid tower we're reviewing fit and finish is up to fractal standard for the most part we have a couple comments we'll be making especially up here later on but you can see the color goes all the way to the back and for the front mesh panel fractal used a new hexagon and triangle pattern combined with a very corsair e triangular ventilation pattern elsewhere in the case we liked it when corsair did it and we like it here too although we wish fractal hadn't chosen to randomly fill in some of the triangles it's subtle but it's hard to unsee it's like a less extreme version of the corsair 220t airflow's front panel in general the case looks less flashy and more business-like than the meshfy 2 line which is why we would gravitate more towards the colorful variants now to the interesting part the five and a quarter base this case can fit two of them that's very rare at this point it comes with this nice little secret compartment you can put stuff in uh or you can put two optical drives there so that makes it a little unique because right now to get two optical drives we checked and the newest stuff that we've reviewed that makes sense for it would maybe be a fractal defined 7xl which is large or something like a be quiet dark bass pro 900 v2 that would also fit optical drives the door is designed to open with a fabric pull tab although it got knocked off pretty much every single time we picked up the case and to fill the rarely used space frackle has installed what looks like but is definitely not an ashtray in one of the slots it fit in perfectly with the supercomputers of the 70s this tray could be used for storing screws but we'd caution against the temptation because transporting at once and forgetting their presence might result in a bad spill installing an optical drive eats up a lot of space under the power supply shroud and it requires removing one of the hard drive brackets but it's possible to have one optical drive and one three and a half inch hard drive under the shroud at the same time shorter five and a quarter devices like lcds might fit without removing anything it just depends on what it is opening the magnetic door every time you want to get your dvd drive or your fan controller is annoying obviously but that's a familiar problem from the optical drive days of your and something we've encountered many times just not recently three and a half inch support is limited to two drives because only two brackets are included but as usual with fractal cases you can purchase an additional bracket up to three total supported and these brackets can each hold one three and a half and one two and a half inch drive simultaneously two mounts are located under the shroud and one behind the motherboard tray at the front of the case so we immediately run into also the limitations of optical drives on cases and mostly why they went away if you look at this because of the presence of optical drive support the entire front bottom of the case down here it's useless because it's all caging for that stuff and so there's nothing really else for fractal to do with this except for extend the power splash route all the way to the front because they have no other use for that space except for making visible the ugly caging for hard drives or optical drives so that's why they've run it up front now we have always had issues with power supply shrouds because they uh they're problematic for cooling performance of a gpu you pretty much always have better performance without the shroud here but it's a trade-off of hiding your cables sacrificing a couple of degrees sometimes it's a lot worse if you're running a micro atx case for example or like the nano version of this where the shroud is suddenly within an inch or two of the gpu that's bad especially when you're in the era of three slot gpus because now it's effectively the same as pushing it right up against the glass so they have their downsides and that's one of the criticisms we've had of these for a long time but fractal runs this all the way to the front and because of that you end up with unusable mounting space at the front of the case where those fans are which means if we pull these radiators out you'll see the limitations so the maximum limitation of the radiator support that was ambitious is uh 280 millimeters on the front this is a 240 rad and there is sufficient clearance to get it tubes oriented down but if you look in here the screw rails here they stop at the top of the shroud of course so this could just barely fit a 360 if that shroud weren't there but then you wouldn't have the optical drive support so it's sort of one or the other whether or not it was a worthwhile sacrifice for the most part um a lot of cases already cut the shroud short and run a 360. so this at least makes fractal a little more unique and we think that is worth doing for some design variants in the market now putting a 240 in here you can do up top but this is about the maximum size they really stop short on pulling the top radiator mount forward you can see if we look at the top of the case up here it stops very early they don't bring it all the way out and so it does mean that the chance of having an accidental incompatible set of two radiators is very low so that's nice but it also severely restricts how much you can put in the case and if you look at this this thing doesn't even have fans on it right now and we're already running very close to the motherboard which is largely the reason that they cut this short because going up in size to like a 280 or something you're gonna run right up against the board and that'll be a problem for vrm heatsinks so component clearance prevents the installation of 280 ml top radiators and fractal has included an offset mounting kit to make it easier to fit 240 models this mounting kit came in its own bag with its own instructions which really makes it look like a last minute addition or afterthought to correct an error now as for cable management we didn't have any trouble with cable storage but that's because we didn't install any three and a half inch or five and a quarter inch drives every inch of the pop air is covered in optional mounting locations and using them means more cables and fewer places to put them the one place where we did run into a problem was with the cutout under the very bottom rear corner of the motherboard which is partially obstructed by an atx power supply now for io on this they didn't go too minimalistic like we see sometimes where it starts to actually just get incredibly annoying and this one there's two usb 3.0 ports on the top type a there's a microphone and a headphone three and a half millimeter jack an rgb adjust that you could rewire if you wanted to power obviously and then the unfortunately blanked out usb type-c connector are these run a little expensive we actually did a factory tour of one of these factories in the past and they uh hand wire all of the wires into the header which is part of why it's so expensive so unfortunate that is an extra ten dollars if you want to buy it they actually have a whole list of extra add-ons you can buy so there's a gpu mounting kit if you want to get a vertical gpu in there that 46 dollars it turns the 90 case into 130 140 case you're very close to just getting even from fractal uh torrent compact which is better like a lot better so probably not worth there also unless you're water cooling the gpu it will run fairly hot in this small of a box anyway so we wouldn't recommend that they also sell a few other things that they've got a hard drive tray kit for eight dollars they have an ssd bracket kit for eight dollars the usb kit for ten dollars and sort of nickel and diming their way back into charging you more for a case basically but these days sadly 80 which is the floor price for the non-rgb one and 90 cases are not nearly as common as they used to be but there are still a lot of competitors and we're looking at those today too now for other small features it has a dust filter for the power supply not the highest quality one the plastic that forms it is large and obstructs much more space than it really needs to or has any business doing fortunately power supplies for the most part uh this is going to be sufficient for them to breathe it is not particularly uh expensive in the way it's all assembled and built as you can see we've now popped out the filter that was supposed to be permanently attached oops uh so it's okay it's fairly standard magnetic dust filter on the top fairly standard if you run exhaust on the top this you really don't need it at that point you can take it off and save yourself fractions of a degree maybe one degree celsius reduction and then the front does not have a filter but this is a good thing because uh for we've got to take the ashtray out and then we can take the front panel off so this as you can see no additional dust filtration in here they are using these very fine um mesh materials these days in a lot of cases like the fan tech series cases really popularized this and then fractal is now jumping on board with it as well where instead of using the larger steel mesh than putting an additional dash filter behind it they just do the ultra fine mesh and this is much better we've tested these with a larger mesh a dos filter sometimes they do two dash filters we've tested them like this with and without dust filters this always performs best because you are blocking the least amount of air because as soon as you put a dust filter behind it you now have like if you imagine this on it you now have the metal forming the mesh holes on the filter lining up with the holes for the actual mesh behind it for the front of the case and that blocks airflow and it really doesn't help with dust control when the holes are as fine as this so that's a good thing okay enough of my part we're going to go to patrick for a little bit to talk about some of his thoughts on the case he especially has thoughts on rgb leds whenever i run into a project where we need to start wiring rgb leds i go get patrick to do it not because he likes doing it but because i hate doing it and he and i can ask him to do it for me so anyway we're gonna ask him what he thinks about leds because this is the pop air rgb uh the cyan model one of 20 skus there is an rgb controller in here it's included with the i o it's tucked in right here it's just a little five volt three pin argb header that you can hook your daisy chained fans into and that is all the rgb in the case other than the power button up here so we can plug it in and turn it on i can hold this rgb control button here to change modes and then i can quick tap it to cycle through but you might notice as i'm cycling through here that i have rainbow i have these two colors here these two colors these two colors i don't have any solid cyan option uh this is fading through different colors here so this case comes in cyan magenta green and orange and we don't have solid color options for any of that so when i was building this i wanted to set it up so that when andrew came in to film it later it would match the colors and look like all the renders that are online but i wasn't able to do that so if you do want to match these fans to the case interior you can as usual you know just plug these this header here and your motherboard and sync it through your rgb software of choice but we'd like to see a baked in color that actually matches the case for these fractal pop air rgb units so the stock fans front and back are aspect 12 120 millimeter rgb fans uh these should be identical to the non-rgb fans that are in the silent models and the non-rgb air models um they're rated for 1200 rpm uh when i was running the tests you know it looked like that was about accurate these spun a little fast so taking a look in here you can see these fans are mounted right on the front of the chassis against the front panel they did that probably to get the leds to come through really clear you know there's nothing in the way of them you can see them very clearly we usually like to see the fans mounted back inside the chassis that gives them a better chance to pull air in across the full surface area of the mesh rather than just the area right in front of them it shouldn't matter too much in this instance i'd like to see them inside the chassis as well just because it makes it a lot easier to access the screws getting in here with the screwdriver once all the system is built in here is pretty difficult so taking a look at the other side here these fans each have 500 millimeter cables on them which normally would be perfectly adequate but the way the cutouts are placed here the stock cable routing makes it so that the fan cables are just a little short to reach all areas of the motherboard the fans can be daisy chains together and it seems like maybe that's what fractal wants you to do we plugged in a fan extension here just because these cables can't quite reach at the bottom uh this would be kind of asking a lot to get into headers at the bottom edge here that covers the fans and leds and uh i'll throw it back to steve to finish out the build section a couple of other small things in here before we jump into the thermals and the noise for this so side panel attachment is simple and secure it uses captive screws we'd like to see a handle on the glass side panel like the one on the metal panel just to help avoid fingerprints because they get everywhere but that's a relatively minor issue the front panel can theoretically be pulled off with a handle on the bottom but as you saw it's a little difficult sometimes it makes sense at this price point overall but this thing it just doesn't compare well to the hinged easy access doors and a removable radiator brackets we've seen on some of the other fractal cases higher up in price point as it is though it's difficult to access the screws for the stock fans with the system built in the case and the accessibility overall is somewhat limited just by the nature of the design especially accommodating the five and a quarter base now for some thermal tests stock thermal testing has been a weak point for some fractal cases in the past even the meshify models when they've been under-supplied with stock fans although you could fix that the pop the non-mini and the non-xl comes with a reasonable set of three stock fans which may be enough to solve that problem our torture test is a full system cpu and gpu load showing just some fractal cases first this workload raised the cpu temperature to 47 degrees celsius above ambient which dropped to 43 degrees when we removed the front panel the pop airs a single layer of mesh sands backing filter allows this result that shows relatively low obstruction by the panel the torrent remains a clear and obvious leader especially in price with the meshfy 2 compact performing mostly similarly to the pop era rgb onto the comparative charts assuming the pop goes on sale for the stated 80 to 90 dollars there's not much in our current lineup of favorites that can be considered a direct competitor prices have risen the 4000 d airflow is currently 105 in most listings while the p400a digital is 110 both are competitive but obviously more expensive the nzxt h510 flow and the montaq x3 mesh are the closest semi-recent matches to the pop air's price and market but we'll use the more expensive h7 flow for comparison instead because the h510 flow kind of sucks and we weren't big fans of it the x3 averaged 47 degrees in this test tied with the pop air while the h7 flow was slightly warmer at 48 degrees the pop is above average overall in the same torture test the average gb temperature was 57 degrees above ambient which dropped slightly to 56 degrees with the removal of the front panel not enough to be outside the margin of error but a little bit of movement both the front and the back of the case are well ventilated but the full length power supply shroud is what's limiting the cooling potential here at the bottom of the case where the gpu really needs it the x3 pulled ahead here with a 52 degree average but its claim to fame is that it comes with six stock fans so high performance should be expected as a sacrifice the x3's overall build quality is far inferior to fractals so where it makes up some room and thermals it loses ground elsewhere the h7 flow also performed well at 53 degrees above ambient this is one instance though where installing fraxel's vertical gpu riser could help performance in some situations giving the gpu more room to breathe but it really depends on the size of the video card as we said earlier in many situations it could easily make things worse you'll just have to size it up based on how fat of a video card you bought the pop aeris gpu cooling isn't dangerously bad but among the current wave of high airflow cases these results are warm for sure some larger fans would help if you stick around for the standardized fan testing at the end you'll see some of those results the average gpu temperature during a gpu heavy fire strike extreme stress test was nearly identical to the original torture test result at 57 degrees that doesn't place it any higher on the charge with the x3 and the h7 flow still beating it at 55 degrees and 52 degrees respectively moving on to the blender test rendering our monkey head testing on the cpu resulted in a cpu average of 36 degrees above ambient that puts the pop air back in the saddle within margin of error of the h7 flow and the x3's tight average of 35 degrees cpu cooling and the pop air is good out of the box switching to gpu only rendering for the scene without the cpu doing much of anything the gpu average was 25 degrees over ambient the deltas are less extreme here than in the torture test because it's a lighter workload but the pop air is about two degrees warmer than the h7 flow and the x3 which are nearly tied moving to our larger and higher performance set of standardized fans improved thermals across the board with a new cpu average of 42 degrees beating the h7 flow's 44 degree average the x3 is effectively out of the running without the benefit of its six stock fans averaging 51 degrees remember that standardizing fans is primarily an academic exercise here but it was one that was highly requested by you all this is useful when comparing cases where we normalize against one set but it takes away other fair advantages from cases like the tort the gpu average dropped to 52 degrees closer to the middle of the pack although the h7 flow still won here with a 50 degree average the montaq x3 managed to tie at 52 degrees if you want a pop air rgb it may make sense to buy a pop air and supply some larger rgb fans with the three stock fans running at 100 the pop air's noise level as measured with our standardized setup was 39.4 dba that's on par with the h7 flow we found that the stock fans in our review unit ran a little faster than the advertised 1200 rpm typically between 1300 and 1400 rpm but that's within the normal 10 manufacturing variants as we mentioned earlier fractal is also releasing silent versions of the pop cases but we probably won't test those in the future lowering the case's noise level to 36 dba for the threshold we use for testing required setting fan speeds to 80 or about 1100 rpm this reduction is smaller than we usually have to make and there was little effect on cpu temperature which climbed to 48 degrees over ambient it stayed ahead of the h7 flows 50 degree average while the x3 is completely disqualified by virtue of not having adjustable fan speeds at all the gpu average climbed to an unpleasant 59 degrees over ambient handily beaten by the h7 flows 54 degrees if you're trying to tune the fan speeds in the pop keep a careful eye on the gpu temperature more so than the cpu that goes double for the less ventilated silent thermals so wrapping it all up then first of all the pro error is definitely an easy choice for at least one type of user and that's somebody who wants a five and a quarter bay in a modern case anyway this is it this is about the best five and a quarter bay implementation we've seen basically ever just because it stopped and so it never advanced so uh defines seven things like that large cases it's not abnormal for them to have one or to have one you can hack your way into a five and a quarter bay on the case but this is one of the better ones we've seen especially on a smaller case that's modern it's high build quality modern standards for cable management things like that so that's the easy part now in terms of the look the build quality and the hardware compatibility the pop seems like a case that should cost more than eighty dollars these days uh this it looks about right for eighty dollars about three or four years ago but today this is higher quality than probably most cases in that 80 90 range for the the rgb version are are able to compete with so that's a good thing for fractal it does put them on better footing than say the montec x3 which is much much lower build quality even though it's competitive thermally it's also on fairly competitive footing with the h510 flow which we don't particularly like anyway there's just not a lot below 100 these days in cases so the landcool 215 used to be a 70 to 80 case that would be our go-to recommendation in the pops price point if it were still there but right now and we just checked it was a hundred dollars so if fractal can hold to the msrp for at least a little while then the papa error starts to make a lot more sense if it climbs in price it's not really competitive enough unless you're looking for the aesthetic specifically like or different colored interiors things you can't really get elsewhere that would be its main staying power if the price creeps so we're definitely not looking forward to the listing chaos that will be created with 20 different skus on new ag or amazon or wherever if you want one of the cases and you don't see it in the stock probably check one of the other sku listings because it's going to be a nightmare in terms of performance the popular could definitely do better the price leaves a room to budget for some better fans so you're able to make it work couple suggestions here so as is the case with most chassis that have uh top fan ports if you're doing any cooler really but especially an air cooler and you mount a couple of fans to the top because you're thinking well gn said the thermals could be better i'm gonna add some fans if you just add two fans to the top and you put one of them up here before the fan for the air cooler what will happen is that it will come in the front of the case and then it'll leave it's never gonna hit the cooler so it won't really make it better what you could do though is either replace the fans with higher quality ones or you could add a fan just in the top rear as exhaust that would make sense or you could put it in the top front as intake there's no reason you can't do that you might want to do both as intake and then you basically got a really strong positive pressure set up and the air is going to come out the back including these holes down here where it's heavily ventilated in the pcie slot and near the gpu so that may be something to look into if you want to build one of these cases it would help get some more air through the system historically ndxt has been one of fractal's closest competitors same for fantax really at least now with the designs they're doing today hopefully ndxc will launch a sub h7 tier case sometime soon that isn't the h510 flow but for now the h7 is sort of the the main competitor from ndxt fantax you should look at the p400a the big thing there though it's a competitive case and thermally it does very well but the p400a is an ancient case like tooling internally and you notice it so uh this overall we'd say is sort of in that group of cases where we recommend it right now the 80 to 90 dollar price class it's pretty rare and uh if fractal can hold then there's a good spot as soon as it jumps to a hundred dollars though our recommendation shifts to be you should look at the other cases on the market because there's a lot of them at 100 to 110 right now so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.cameras.net it helps out directly you can grab one of the mouse mats like i have on the table here in front of me for a dust sized mousing service we have them in blue and black and red and black with fully custom in-house designs and a lot of effort going into things like the custom color rubber underside the stitching at the borders things like that or patreon.com gamers nexus where you can get a bonus post for some behind-the-scenes updates what we're working on right now i wrote a big one up and posted it the other day so thank you for watching and supporting we'll see you all next time\n"