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Uh, well, it's kind of new CPU season, and I've got the X870E Aorus Master X3D Ice and the X3D dual edition, X3D 2. Dual 3D V-Cache on my setup here. Can't help but notice I've got two GPUs. I've got a PCIE splitter that I've reprogrammed to do unholy things. There's a whole other separate video about that. But, we need to do a build, and Fractal is stepping out on us. Uh, it's an unusual Fractal Design. Yeah, Fractal's got a new case. And this needs to go in there, because can't you hear it? It's kind of loud.
The Pop 2 Vision? That's what we're doing? Vision? Okay. It comes with four fans, and there's a metal dust filter that goes on the top. Okay, so obviously, if the idea isn't we're using the front for intake, we're using the side for intake, and the bottom. And it also requires reverse airflow fans if you want to hide the wires. Which they've done with the included fans. The first thing you notice is at the rear, you've got the option, it looks like, for dual power supplies. Now, this is a seven-slot case, not an eight-slot case. And I think if Fractal had done a version of this that had eight slots for
dual power supplies, people who were building workstations would be pretty excited by that, cuz eight slots you've got some expandability. Now, for the dual AM5, the dual 3D V-Cache on our Gigabyte motherboard, seven slots is going to work out great, even though I'm going to put two GPUs in this thing, but eight would be better. As it is, instead of a power supply, you've got room here to mount 2 and 1/2-in drives, quite a number of them. I want to see what our build guide options give us. I know no doubt, when you're doing a build with this, your build is going to be different than the build that I'm doing. But, Fractal does an exceptionally good job with their manuals always. For any
Fractal case that you're considering, you can look at the layout in their manuals and see what options you have for AIO mounting, for fan mounting, and which fans should be reversed and which fans shouldn't be reversed. Can you get away with normal fans? What does it look like when you mount a normal fan? Where do the drives go? Where do the power supplies go? What are the options? And most of the time, it covers all your options. Sometimes we find creative ways to like 3D print something or add fans in unexpected ways, but most of the time Fractal covers everything. So, this is advertised as a case with one position for a 3 and 1/2 in drive. You got three dedicated positions for two and 1/2 in
drives. For motherboard compatibility, it's ATX, micro-ATX, mini-ITX, and that's pretty much it. And it's designed for an ATX type power supply. It has one USB type A front panel port, 5 gigabit, one type C 5 gigabit, and a combined audio jack. Top radiator supports up to a 360 mm max, 120 mil fan or radiator at the rear, maximum PSU length 190 mm, and maximum GPU length 412 mm. CPU cooler max height 172 mm. You can use a screw to secure the front, but it ships in the unsecured configuration. One of the weaknesses, uh I have pun intended, of this case design is that very often this corner will give you a lot of flex. But, Fractal has uh engineered some significant I mean, look.
I'm doing a you know, I'm I'm pushing down on that pretty hard. It's pretty sturdy. So, not a weakness at all, actually. Fractal's also done pretty reasonable job hiding the rivets at the bottom for the fans, so that you can't really see how the fans are mounted. There's a lot of aesthetic choices. Uh look, I'm somebody that doesn't mind if you're computing on a cardboard box, but for certain people who are looking for a certain aesthetic, uh these fans are RGB and the RGB they use chains together. Fractal usually has a box of accessories, but this doesn't seem to require a lot of extra accessories. It's all in a little bag. I do notice that they've got an extra, you know, friction fit ball clip here.
So, like sometimes these little clips get broken, especially if you slam the side of the case really hard. There's an extra one in the plastic bag should that happen. It's nice and practical to preemptively include spare parts. Our top has a power button. We also got a combination button that looks like RGB and reset. We'll find out what those do once we get the system put together. It'll be a surprise. Boom. Here's our completed build. I have some build notes for you. First off, the X670E Aorus Master X3D Ice top notch for this board. Quick release for the GPUs, which makes it easy cuz this is going to be kind of an experimental
machine for me. I mean, how often are you really changing your GPUs? But being able to push the button to remove the GPUs, this actually would be a good thing if you travel. If you travel a lot with your computer, it's really hard on it to travel with the GPU unless you can mechanically fasten the GPU to the case somehow. I prefer to travel without the GPU installed at all. It's a great motherboard to do that. The other thing is that it comes with a fan for the DRAM. DDR5 will overheat. And this comes with a little fan and it's whisper quiet and it keeps the memory cool. Now, build notes for this case. I've got our AIO mounted in the top. Ended up using the NZXT that we used with the X3D II
uh CPU from AMD and that's great. Our GPUs, we are rocking the AI Tops R9 700s. This is like a 970 XT, but it has 32 gigs of VRAM instead of 16. It does have a blower style motor, but as long as the cards are unloaded, you can barely hear the fan. And two of them means that I have 64 gigs of VRAM for whatever kind of crazy experiments that I want to be working on that require 64 gigs of VRAM. I've also got uh M.2 notes, M.2 and U.2. So, if we put a U.2 in here, the design of the case is actually pretty good cuz you got the side vent and all of our fans are configured for intake, and the three in the top on the AIO are configured for exhaust. So, this is basically pulling air in from everywhere, including the
back. I think I'd probably add an exhaust fan to the back, as well, to pull in even more air. And that causes air to come in the side. If you are rocking a U.2, like, you know, you can't get a good deal on flash, maybe you get some surplus flash, or there's like a local, you know, business class machine, or like a server auction, and you have old U.2. These make a fair bit of heat. You know, these can be up to 25 watts. And having it on the side here, for better cooling, works out. Uh the dual power supplies thing is a little perplexing, because after doing this build, I don't know that I would recommend this case for larger or
oversized motherboards. You could get a Threadripper to work in here if you have a Threadripper that has a normal ATX motherboard. Um the cabling at the front with the rubber grommet, that is really nice for cable management. And that does give you a little bit of leeway in terms of having a motherboard that maybe extends over the front a little bit. But, there are some other aspects of this case that I think make that make building with a an oversized ATX motherboard, uh you know, a little off label. Some of you will say, "Well, yeah, of course, the manual for it recommends ATX."
That's fair, but a lot of the time with Fractal's other cases, you can get away with a larger motherboard. Some of the really hefty, you know, not quite not enterprise grade, not full EATX, or, you know, extra long ATX, but ATX motherboards that are just oversized generally tend to work well in Fractal cases. This is a little bit of a departure from the way that Fractal normally does things. So, it's a little different. Having all of the room at the rear here for cable management and everything else is fantastic. It's great. I love it. I think that they made a small mistake at the bottom where the motherboard, the bottom of the motherboard is, there are recessed areas
for cable routing. But, if you route a cable behind the motherboard, the motherboard is actually too close to the cutout at the bottom. So you need like another 5-6 mm at the bottom there because it will pinch some of the thicker cables like front panel audio. So this has a nice thick shielded feeling front panel audio cable and it's a little problematic to get it routed to the front panel audio connector on this motherboard with that. Also, I really like the fact that you can lock the panels in place with screws. That's great cuz the ball friction fit is not really super tight.
This case is definitely a different aesthetic for Fractal and some of you will find it appealing. Now what's this look like for our torture test? For our torture test, I was running CPU bound and GPU bound AI workloads. AI workloads don't really load the GPUs 100% but our sound meter was upwards of 43 dB. So definitely the sound of whooshing air, not a lot of whining and noise. You can't hear the small fan for the DRAM. There's a total of eight fans in this system that are all running at different RPMs from 800 RPM to about 16 to 1800 RPM when they ramp fully. Our top line CPU temperature, yes, 95° C but our CPU never experienced any thermal
throttling. This is a good balance of not too noisy but also none of the components are overheating. Our GPUs were also quite toasty at times. Peak temperature 90° C. That is not unusual for blower style coolers like this and by far the GPUs were the loudest thing in the system. I think that this system probably could have been down around 40 dB if it were not for the GPUs. And the GPUs at full load will go even louder. So like 46-47 dB with a full fully loaded blower style GPU. But if you're just doing inferencing and you're doing, you know, like running lemonade. AMD has lemonade for Windows and you can run GPU workloads. You can run image generation, you run speech to text, text to speech and also keep the CPU busy. Then the
system's going to generate a fair bit of heat. I mean each one of these GPUs is upwards of 300 watts each. So you know, it's order 5090. Like this is basically 5090 numbers that we have. But the blower style also helps with this design in terms of shunting the heat out of the case whereas you know, dual blower or a pass-through style cooler would be passing more heat into the case. I think that I would add I would recommend adding a rear fan that'll improve the temperature and airflow. So we would be up to nine fans in this configuration with a rear fan. But for eight fans for this config and I didn't have to buy any extra fans. The fans that came with the 360 AIO plus the fans that came with the case were doing pretty good. The
thermals on this were better than I expected. How about that? Now, on to test ECC on X870. Oh yes, there was a bit of a kerfuffle the latest the Giza has some ECC errors ECC errata. But that's going to be in a different video. This has been a quick look at Fractal's new case Pop 2 Vision. Not visions of sugar plums dancing in your head but like visions of some sort of funky case. I don't know. It was fun to build in this. To not be an insanely huge case it was easy to work in and I really like that. I will list level one if you have any questions or miss anything come to the forums.
Let's build a reasonable community. I'm signing out and I'll see you there.
