The Fractal Design Mood feels like the first genuine entry that is geared towards a gaming environment, but also tries to cater to the designers out there. With its Swedish roots that focus on aesthetics and emotion, this is no surprise. Clocking in at $150 retail it is right up there with other upright ITX enclosures while providing a product that clearly leans heavily into design over trying to cram as much into it as possible.

Starting on the exterior, the Fractal Design Mood manages to impress with one of the cleanest looks we have seen on these types of cases. That is likely also going to be one of the biggest draws a user will have, regardless of the other details. In other words, if looks are your thing, you are far more likely to accept other compromises. The biggest of which is the limited GPU length in combination with dual slot support compared to other, similar models. While it is a certainly to find decently performant units that fit, you will be locked out of the high-end unless you go the custom watercooling route with a single slot waterblock. Even if you can find a GPU that is under 325 mm in length, there are no top tier air cooled options that are dual slot.

That feeling of constraints here and there continues when you consider that some of the storage requires more or less of a compromise if needed, with the 3.5" variant cutting your cooling potential down considerably for example. That said, it is clear that Fractal Design included the tray for those who need that massive amount of storage on a budget, which are likely not high-end users, but likely more casual users or those where the best possible CPU performance isn't on top of their list. Last but not least, the fan ends up being quite loud, something that could be solved by a manual curve in your BIOS at the expense of a few degrees in temperatures. Fractal could have alleviated all this by venting the sides in the same fashion as the front of the enclosure.

Otherwise, the Fractal Design Mood manages to work as well as other cases in the segment, as you have to expect the compact form factor to be a bit tricker during the assembly process, but the result is a clean & functional build that is modular and doesn't try to overengineer things. In the end, the Fractal Design Mood is probably their best entry into the ITX segment to date, improving on the cooling issues to the point where you can finally consider it for intensive scenarios. So, we can recommend the Fractal Design Mood if you are planning to build a mainstream system in an upright ITX chassis and want the looks to go with it.