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DH Drive air ae400 welcome to my unboxing and overview of the fractal
design Arc midi R2 which takes pretty much everything that was good about the
original Arc midi and well improves upon
it so what they were going for was not only an excellent air Cooling case which
The Arc midi was in fact my wife's PC is still running in an arc midi but they
wanted to add flexible liquid cooling support to it as well because whether
you're using an all-in-one or a completely custom Loop many of the kids
today are adding water cooling to their systems so in terms of the overall specs
we've got a pretty nondescript Plain Jane Brown box maximum airf flow with a
sleek and ministic front panel design in fact they haven't changed that much
their front intake now includes an easy to clean dust filter this was one of my
complaints about the original Arc was it just left kind of like horrible dust
rings on it and there wasn't really a whole lot you could do about it front interface includes USB 3 which the old
one did as well pop panel design for maximum air flow which it was before as
well and the stylish windowed side panel made from acrylic asow you to see your
components that's their other way of saying that it has a window two separate
hard drive cages can be moved around individual hard drive cage feature
vibration dampening rubber grommets and three highquality 140 mm silent fans and
extensive water cooling support in the top panel and behind the front panel so
I'm not going to spend too much time opening the
box that my friends is how we do it and
we find a hard foam which is not my
favorite I do like to see soft or closed
cell Foams but I understand that from a cost savings perspective sometimes hard
Foams are a necessary evil from the manufacturing side and as long as
they're reasonably welld designed they can protect the case
so I'm just going to go ahead and see if I can pop that back in place it looks like that came loose in shipping
speaking of hardam and hating it um at least they've gone for about an inch of
thickness on the corners here so I've definitely seen worse let's go ahead and
open this bad boy up so the first thing
we're going to see I guess is the bottom of the case this is unusual we never do
this so it's got two different sizes of feet large ones on the front of the case
small ones on the back as well as a removable fan filter which you can see
you can simply slide out like this not too long which was a problem with older
cases particularly the Corsair 800d where the fan filter on the bottom was
enormous so it meant that you had to slide it out that far in order to get it
out which meant you usually hit the wall or some other sort of obstacle so this
one's sort of like a dual 140 mm size
you've also got a little air intake here so you'll get a little bit more airf
flow for the front however I don't think that's going to be a major factor in
cooling for this case because most of it going to be coming through the Fairly
open front mesh since the front panel is the part of the case that we're
repairing here we might as well show you how this front piece goes on so this is
what they meant by easy to remove and easy to clean it's one solid piece of
metal mesh with a sort of foam filter
behind it that should allow air to pass through pretty easily but will also
provide very effective dust catching you
can probably take this whole thing and just kind of dip it in water and soap
and wash it out and you can see we've got one 140 mm CL fan included in the
front although there's room to mount an additional one but what you'll also see
here is a wide variety of different mounting holes these will allow you to
mount things like dual 120 mm radiators in the front of the case which you might
say by the way it goes in like this click uh which you might say well lonus
how will you have room for that I'll show you once we open it up two 5 and
1/4 in Bay round out the clean front bezel that looks very similar to the
original there we go now that's clicked into place on the top we find once again
very very open open free airflow so that
is the arc concept as well as IO including a reset switch that can't be
accidentally pressed by a cat that jumps on your case a microphone and headphone
jack power as well as a power indicator LED two usb3 ports which is an
improvement over the old one which only had one as well as integrated fan
control with 5vt 7vt and 12vt switches
on this side we find not a whole lot just a plain side panel and then on the
other side we find the windowed side panel that was alluded to in in a very
verbose Fashion on the outside of the box and it has a protective plastic
cover that I actually don't seem to be able to remove so the good news is your
window will look as good as it does out of the box forever the bad news is it
looks like butt because there's air bubbles up no I'm just kidding I got it oh I thought I had it oh there's another
one on the inside anyway it's a bit of a frosted sort of well not frosted it's a
smoked smoked panel so it's going to look a little bit darker inside it's up
to the individual whether they prefer that or the clear side panel but uh
there you go it has a bit of a a bit of a different look to it so on the back we
find another 140 mm included fan although with optional mounts for a 120
mil as well as seven PCI slots and then
an additional auxiliary one where you can put something like a fan controller or whatever else a bottom mounted power
supply has noise dampening foam around it so to give you guys some idea just
how smoked that side panel is I'm going to go ahead and remove the inside piece
and you can look at me with or without
the smoke there you go so it makes things a little bit darker but if you
have lighting effects inside your case it's probably not going to affect things
too much but if you don't have lighting effects then it will look significantly
dimmer inside once we get inside the case we find out how all of this is
supposed to work so up here in the top there's that flexible radiator support
so there's another 140 mm fan included
but you can see there are a butt ton of
different mounting points for different ized fan so you could put up to a triple
120 mm radiator up here without any
difficulty but you would be sacrificing some of that 5 and 1/4 in expansion now
in order to make this easier all you have to do is remove two screws here in
the back one of which I have pre- loosened and the other one looks like it's going to be a problem for me and
then you can remove the entire top of the case just like you could on the V1
chassis so there you have it so here's
dual 140 mm mounting points as well as
triple 120 mm mounting points you can actually
put another 140 over here should you so
desire although I don't know that that's something that I would necessarily
recommend sacrificing a 5 and a/ qu inch Bay for now in the front of the case
that's where things are also quite interesting because you can remove this
top one so you can fit a reasonably long graphics card in here in fact anything
that's on the market currently pretty much without removing it but you can
remove it to give you the option to install even longer graphics cards in
order to give yourself more options at the front of the case you can also check
this out screws down here remove the second hard drive cage meaning that you
can only Mount B you can mount things
creatively pretty much at that point so you could go ahead and put ssds on the
back of the motherboard tray more on that later but you could also put nice
thick radiators here in the front without any difficulty at all more
flexibility for the drive cages though if you're one of those people who says
well look at this guys look at this in profile not much air flow can get
through here and you don't mind having cabl sticking out the back of your hard
drive area you can actually check this in this way instead of the default which
is sideways mounted if I could figure out how to do
it then that would be great there we go so now you get more
free flowing airf flow especially if you're not installing all five drives in
there so fractal design is saying they have 26 mm of cable management space
behind the motherboard tray I believe it
so there's quite a lot of space you can easily fit a 24 pin cable back here
they've also gone with what I really like to see which is a much larger
grommet down here at the bottom than the ones that are up here along the side
because most of the cables are going to have to come through here before they go up to the eight pin which also has
rubber grommets back there or the eight pin that's positioned where I hate
having it positioned in the middle at the top 24 pin PCI Express as well as
anything that goes up here to your 5 and 1/4 in Drive cages on the back we find
the 2 and 1/2 in SSD mounts that I talked about before these are very basic
SSD mounts and you actually have to screw into the bottom of the ssds from
where the motherboard would sit so it's not as elegant as fractal implementation
of this feature on other cases and I'd really recommend just using velcro or
double-sided tape or something to stick those on there also on the back of the
case we find the power as well as the
splitter leads for the built-in fan controller so it uses is a single MOX
for power and then it also is able to control up to three fans using a simple
voltage control and not providing any RPM
monitoring and so there's lots of room for cable management in the back not as
many cable tie Loops as I'd like to see so there's only a couple rows of them
here and here I like to see some cable tie Loops leading up to the eight pin if
I was to criticize something about the cable management in this case which is
of course what you people pay me good money to do internal hookups are oh all
right well I've moved them before apparently I was ready to go with those
at the front are the standard fair so there's a USB 3 connector and it's sort
of standard bulky form as well like to see this check this out a USB 2
connector so you can't hook them both up at the same time but this gives you the
option to plug into USB 2 if your motherboard doesn't support USB 3
without a weird funky adapter HD audio is included as well as your power switch
reset switch and hard drive LED and power LED all of these are black cables
which is a definite plus last but not
least this is something I've been forgetting on a lot of cases lately
let's go ahead and check out what they include in terms of accessories but I'm
going to go ahead and use my diving powers to
predict screws okay so nothing unexpected some
screws some cable ties and not a whole
lot else although they do include one of those handy dandy little adapters so
that you can use your screwdriver to put in the there they are the motherboard
standoffs I do like those those are useful way to go fractal don't forget to
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on the video let me know what you thought like the video and share it with anyone who you think should buy this
case which is anyone who appreciates
simple Swedish design and um unlike Ikea
things that don't just immediately fall apart although you wouldn't know that looking at what I've done to it here
he