MEDIA MADNESS

WELL, THIS CERTAINLY isn’t a gaming PC. Can it run games? Just about, but it barely made it through our benchmarks, which use ultra settings at 1080p. Dialing all the graphical settings down to minimum in Rise

ofthe TombRaider and running it in 720p resulted in a more workable frame rate, but the game looked eerily reminiscent of Runescape circa 2003. That’s all right, though—this wasn’t designed to be a gaming computer. As a media center, it does the job perfectly, running quietly and loading fast.

The Node 202 looks great, but it isn’t easy to work in. It’s packed with nice features and innovations from Fractal Design, such as the perpendicular GPU mounting system and the SSD shroud, but they don’t make it any simpler to build with it. Cable management is easier than in some other Mini-ITX cases, at least. Our finished build looks efficient and tidy inside, with the minimal RGB effects on the motherboard mostly concealed by the 202’s black plastic exterior.

If we hadn’t wanted to keep the price down, we’d have considered installing a GPU. Swapping out the CPU for something with a bit more muscle, and adding a GTX 1060 or 1070 would make this a perfectly capable rig for gaming—perhaps a familyoriented console replacement, perfect for multiplayer sessions in front of the TV. Streaming TV and movies is a snap, and the SSD has sufficient storage for a reasonable number of video files, should downloading be your preferred method. A keyboard with an integrated trackpad or a wireless controller might be useful, to ensure ease of use from your favorite armchair.

There are some other things we might change, if we had a chance at a do-over. MSI, Gigabyte, and ASRock all offer cheaper MiniITX boards, so if gaming is fully off the table, the extra functionality of the X470-I isn’t necessary. Our choice of mobo also offers dual M.2 slots, which wasn’t needed for this build—an M.2 SSD would have been easier to install than the SATA drive we chose, but it would have driven the price up.

If you’re a real glutton for punishment, there’s arguably no need to install Windows. A Linux-based OS is cheaper, although it would involve far more software wrangling. There are still plenty of useful media center programs that can run on Linux, such as home cinema app Kodi. Chrome is available for 64-bit versions of Ubuntu, too. Overall, this build was a modest success—it looks good and it does the job we wanted it to—but there’s definitely room for improvement.

There’s ample space for a 1 GPU here, should you decide you’d like to do some proper couch gaming on this rig. It’s a fairly complicated procedure, however, requiring the removal of the other side of the case and the adjustment of a support peg to fit the exact size of the card you use. The aptly-named Integra 2 SFX PSU pumps out all the power a small build like this needs. If you’d prefer a flashier compact PSU, the Node 202 can also be purchased without a power supply for just $80. The Athlon 220GE’s 3 integrated graphics can handle standard online browsing and streaming perfectly well at an affordable price. The stock cooler does a decent job of keeping the temperature down, too.