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fully private click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing of something that
we saw for the first time at computex this is the fractal design Ark
mini not to be confused with the ark midi Ark mini R2 so this is an matx case
that is designed to be extremely Compact
and accept a metric butt ton of cooling gear and hard
drives but not necessarily at the same time so in terms of the packing material
we've got a hard foam which is never particularly impressive but I don't
really mind it as much with smaller cases because they tend to weigh less
and are therefore less likely to damage the foam in transit due to their weight
although you can see that this piece barely made it so you can see there's uh
think this is why I don't like hard foam soft foam wouldn't have had that problem
next up we've got the users's manual which we are going to promptly throw
away because I have a reviewer's guide haha which is just as good as a user's
manual if not better next up we've got the plastic sheathing that covers it and
in theory keeps it safe in transit and
that got boring so let's pick up on the actual case so starting on the outside
we have that typical clean Swedish design that we get from fractal design
which incidentally happened happens to be a Sweden based company so on the
front we find two 5 and 1/4 in Bays although the use of these is incredibly
optional as you're going to find out once we open it up we have this piece of
plastic that holds this front panel in place as well as the removable fan
filter that is to be cleaned by running water over it you know when you clean it
anyway so it's got foam okay anyway there's two 120 mm fans of which one of
them is included so that's their silent R2 series fans and I actually really
like this implementation here with a nice heavy fan filter it feels very
robust got a nice little fractal design logo here and then just a simple front
that is very very clean very very simple and all you got to do is put in a couple
screws to install a fan and you are done
on the top we find The Usual Suspects in
terms of I/O we've got a reset switch a microphone port a headphone jack a power
switch with a power LED as well as two USB 3.0 ports and an integrated fan
controller 5 S and 12 volts are all supported the right hand side of the
case is completely plain as we'd expect from fral design and the left hand side
of the case has a nice smoked window that I've removed the outside layer of
plastic off of but not the inside layer at the back of the case we find another
120 mm fan slot there's actually a total of seven possible fan slots IO and a
four plus one arrangement for I/O I would have preferred to have that fifth
one below it but it would have made the case that much taller so I understand
why they did this the way they did you can put things like fan speed controllers and stuff here you've got a
little padded bottom power Supply Mount that also has padding on the bottom here
and then at the top just like on previous Arc series cases well I
wouldn't have been funny if that slipped and fell all right let's go ahead and do
that you've got another removable cleanable fan filter that comes off the
entire top of the case and this serves a couple of purposes number one is
functional number two is aesthetic because they've used an offset
configuration for the top fan holes so you can see you can mount either a
triple 120 mm radiator and yes it supports a thick triple 120 mm radiator
because of the way that it's offset so the motherboard is actually over here so as long as you don't have any tall
components it can sit right over top of the motherboard or it can support a dual
140 mm Radiator in the top and it doesn't really matter because of the
gaps here so you can see that because there's a lot of space here it doesn't
matter what the spacing of your radiator happens to be I did miss one thing about
the outside I'm sorry there was another fan filter down here on the bottom not
my favorite implementation because it is a longer fan filter but it serves its
purpose you know fairly effectively so it does allow filtration of both the
power supply intake which is isolated from the rest of the system's air flow
as well as this bottom 120 mm fan Mount
that could also be equipped with a radiator so let's go ahead and pull the
side panel off I like smoked side panels I think they look good it's you know
your typical fractal design solid build quality as far as the side panels
concerned not an excessive amount of flex by any stretch so I'll just give
you guys a ah give you guys a little demo of that considering the fact that
most of the the side panel is a window that's what I'd consider to be
acceptable and it also has some weight to it which isn't always the case these
days so inside this is where things start to get really interesting so I
showed you how that radiator support worked up there you can do see the way
that the 5 and a/4 inch Bay is cut out here and the way that it's screwed in
you can do the Dual 140s without
actually removing the 5 and a/4 inch Bays but if you want to you know step up
to the big leagues and you want to move up to a 360 mm radiator you will have to
pull out your 5 and 1/4 in Baye but the good news is that you can you can also
take out your 3 and 1/2 in Baye so you
can see right here that those front 120
mm fans have easy access to be screwed
into radiators so I can show you guys how the 3 and 1/2 in bays are removed so
you can mount as I said before up to six 3 and 1/2 in drives and those will go on
these sleds right here which have the usual fractal design vibration reducing
rubber grommets go ahead pop that out in fact you can actually Mount these
different ways as well so if you want to get a little bit more air flow to your graphics card from that front fan
obviously more of air is going to be able to make it through this guy this
way especially if you don't have hard drives in there versus this way or you
can pull the whole thing out entirely and then just have free flowing air
going straight to your graphics card if you only need a few fans if you do want
to pull that one out you actually just flip it over on the bottom I love
construction of cases that is done with screws versus rivets because it gives
you the flexibility to do what you want to do with it it is more expensive to
implement this like let's be let's be real clear every scent counts when it
comes to case manufacturing but I like it when case manufacturers spend that
extra little bit to give us threaded holes and screws rather than rivets so
there you go that's what it looks like oh okay we got to pull out another
couple screws on the back because I guess they're fral they wanted it to be
you know Swedish designed so you can see this one has quite a bit less Flex than
the window one Swedish designed and you know very solid and all that stuff I
remember their old cases never used to uh have quite that much caregiv to the
solidity particularly in shipping I remember the Define R2 had a couple of
issues with that hard drive cage it wasn't reinforced enough and I didn't
realize that when I did my original video it wasn't until I ordered a container of them at NC and uh some of
them started getting damaged particularly when we shipped them with a bunch of hard drives in them in
pre-built systems so there you go guys take things very seriously when I talk
about the packaging of products because I actually do know all right so there
you go there's that uh there's that cage out so that gives us some idea of just
how open the inside can be so you pull this bad boy out you put a thick rad
here thick double rad here thick triple red up here you can put another single
120 down here you throw a single 120 in the back they've actually got adequate
spacing here for radiators that are slightly wider than a fan and you have a
very capable water cooling extra have a
ganza of a case on a fairly reasonable budget so I'm impressed with this now in
terms of the standard case features it's matx as I mentioned before there's your
four expansion slots it uses standard screws thumb screws for those it's got
all black internal cables which is nice to see and you can also see here there
sorry I want to give you a better view of that you can see here that they come
prewired through the included Cable Management grommets that Corsair made so
popular with the release of the 800d and then on the back we find two more SS
mounts and the way they've implemented this is much better than the way they
used to do SSD mounts on the back of motherboard trays so they are actually
removable using two screws here here and here well here here here and here and
then you just Mount the ssds using the mounting holes here and pull them off
and mount them as you see fit the way it used to be was they were holes that passed through the motherboard tray you
actually had to remove your motherboard in order to mount ssts on their cases so
that was h a little bit ridiculous there's ample Cable Management room in
the back of the case so there's enough for a 24 pin connect but not a whole lot
more I wouldn't expect to be passing anything over it and you've got a CPU
cutout tray or cutout in the motherboard tray just the way that you'd expect on
any modern case thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the
fractal design Arc mini R2 which is not the arc midar 2 don't forget to
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