Big, perky value chassis brings on the old-style bays

Available with some nifty hints of color, Fractal Design’s Pop Air RGB is suitable for seekers of a big PC case with a pair of hidden, old-school 5.25-inch bays, be it for a multi-drive backplane, a classic bay-panel device. or a DVD burner.

Fractal Design’s new Pop series is a complete range of perky-looking PC cases at moderate prices. Coming in black or white base versions, and with Addressable RGB (ARGB) or non-RGB fans, the cases are also available with an optional “pop” of orange, cyan, magenta, or green highlights on the black version. Our tester, the $89.99 Pop Air RGB, is an old-school big tower with a nice bit of color in its back pocket, though it was a merely average performer on our thermal and acoustic tests. Still, if you like the look, it's a solid new entry in the big-tower stakes that will take a truly huge motherboard for an HEDT or workstation build. And has a retro surprise behind a piece of the front panel: the option for 5.25-inch bay devices!

We received the “orange core” version with ARGB fans, two of which shine through an unfiltered 3D mesh face panel. Fractal Design says that the mesh is the filter, which means that users will more easily be able to see when their filters need to be cleaned. Also seen from this angle is a pull tag on the removable section of the front panel, and a side panel made of painted steel sheet.

The Pop Air's combination of steel, glass and plastic panels weighs in at around 16.5 pounds. A quick look around the box shows that it’s designed to please the mainstream segment of the gaming PC case market. Seven slot covers and vents all over the back are common fare, as is the 120mm exhaust fan, the dual-pattern power-supply mount, and the slide-out power-supply dust filter.

The Pop Air front panel supports stock 120mm (RGB) or optional 140mm fans, and has space at the top and bottom to fit the end caps of a so-called “280mm” radiator (technically, of up to 330mm total length).

The top panel features a mesh panel with magnetic tape on its periphery covering a dual fan mount that, like the front panel, supports two fans of 120mm or 140mm sizes. Since space is very tight around the top panel’s 140mm fan mounts, Fractal Design recommends using nothing larger than a dual-120mm (aka 240mm) radiator here.

A closer look at the front of the top panel shows that the Type-C connector hole is filled with a blank cover; this mainstream-priced model has only Type-A ports. It also has separate microphone and headphone jacks, a power button, and a tiny mode button for its built-in ARGB controller.

In a move that appears a nod toward the reintroduction of bay-panel devices, the Pop Air RGB hides dual 5.25-inch external drive bays behind a magnetically attached mini panel, as shown below...

While a look back at past components reveals that manufacturers have placed everything from fan controllers to multi-drive backplanes into spots like these, Fractal Design adds a screw tray to one of its 5.25-inch bays. You can keep it, or replace it with a bay device you like more.

Note for DVD-drive buffs: Gaining access to the full depth of the 5.25-inch bays would require a builder to remove the factory-equipped 3.5-inch/2.5-inch drive trays, which sit in a removable cage about 248mm from the power-supply mount. Fractal Design still rates the Pop Air RGB as supporting a mere 170mm power-supply depth, which seems conservative given our far-more-generous measurement of 240mm.

A separate drive tray on the back of the motherboard tray supports an additional pair of 2.5-inch devices. Users are free to move this part to the top of the power-supply tunnel if desired, and Fractal Design says that it will make spares available to those who wish to equip their cases with additional drives.

Each of the three RGB fans includes ARGB inputs and outputs, plus three-pin fan inputs and outputs. All outputs are designed only to enable daisy-chaining of these devices, with the original connection leading to a motherboard header.

Builders who would rather use the case’s RGB controller will find an ARGB header on the underside of the switch panel...

Cable access holes above and in front of the motherboard feature rolled edges, as does the cooler plate access hole behind the CPU area. A stepped-in area in the front access hole allows easier cable passage, but limits motherboard depth to around 11 inches.

In addition to fan cables, the Pop Air RGB includes a SATA-style power input, and header cables for a motherboard power button, HD Audio, and first-gen USB 3. The SATA-style cable powers both the Pop Air RGB’s ARGB controller and its power-on indicator light. (As for the USB 3 lead, most case manufacturers call these "USB 3.0" despite USB-IF’s "USB 3.2 Gen 1" nomenclature.)

The Pop Air hardware kit includes a pack of M3 drive screws, a pack of #6-32 motherboard standoff screws, a pack of eight shoulder screws for mounting 3.5-inch drives on rubber grommets, nine rubber grommets (eight plus a spare), four cable ties, and four offset radiator brackets.

The reason Fractal Design decided to include its “Extended” radiator brackets is that the Pop Air RGB has only around 40mm of clearance between a 120mm/240mm radiator and a motherboard. The additional brackets provide 12.5mm of extra motherboard clearance horizontally. Indeed, they were completely necessary to clear our test build’s G.Skill TridentZ RGB modules, as you can see in our fleshed-out test build...

As the Pop Air manual mentions only the front-mount option, the “extended radiator brackets” that ease top mounting were likely an afterthought. But any fans placed in a case's top panel mount will improve voltage regulator temperatures, and top-mounted radiator placement is a great way to encourage builders to put fans there.

First off, here's a look at our testing configuration's components...

We'll map the results against some recently tested large ATX cases, some of which have at least a modicum of EATX-board support. Among them are Cooler Master's HAF 500, Corsair's iCUE 5000T RGB, Lian Li's O11 Dynamic EVO, and In Win's N515.

One of the nicer things that we can say about the CPU temperatures we measured (after mounting our platform into the Pop Air RGB) is that they’re only a few degrees worse than average. In fact, they’re right beside the premium-market O11 Dynamic EVO from Lian Li.

We’re very happy to see the Pop Air RGB reach mid-pack voltage-regulator temperatures, but realize that the only case to hit significantly worse temperatures was designed to prevent fans from being installed directly above the voltage regulator. So this is, at best, a neutral showing.

Graphics card temperatures are an oddity for the Pop Air RGB, as they start off normally cool and gradually scale past all others in this test set. This likely means that the case is collecting heat in our tested configuration, but a quick test with a piece of paper showed that all of the fans were flowing correctly.

Noise levels are also mid-pack, so those buying this case should probably base that decision on factors like features and price, rather than sheer acoustic performance....

In sum, all this isn’t an argument of poor performance, by any means, but rather that the case doesn't distinguish itself for doing especially well on our thermal and acoustic trials.

The Pop Air RGB is a great-looking case with its orange accents, but it hardly differentiates itself in our formal test charts. Lacking so much as a Type-C port to get our attention, this mainstream design’s standout feature is one that hardly anyone mentions any longer: a pair of hidden 5.25-inch bays.

Those can be quite handy to builders who know how to use them: We’d be tempted to fit ours with an actively cooled eight-drive 2.5-inch hot-swappable backplane. For those with less exotic plans, we'd look for a color scheme that matches your tastes, and consider the bays a nice old-school throwback in the event you run across a drive bay device (or DVD burner) you want to install down the road.

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