welcome to unboxing day we're bringing them back officially and we are starting
things up with a product that I'm sure the
manufacturer expected me to open in a timely manner I mean look at this Josh
from fractal where's that label Josh from fractal sent this thing via
International today do you have any idea how expensive that is it is now whatever
the date is today May the 7th and I haven't even touched it yet so let's go
ahead and open up the Define s from fractal
design oh I sliced the handrail
crap Intel 750 series drives feature the
new NVMe standard for never-before seen
performance from a consumer grade SSD click now to learn more
good packaging they got going on
here there we
go all right well that's a reassuring
sound hopefully it didn't get broken in shipping so the concept be behind the
Define s is for fractal design to have a case that is less expensive than their
Flagship Define r series while offering
the same build quality the same Aesthetics and actually even better
options for water cooling for their liquid cooling efficient AO customers so
it looks like I got the windowed side panel version but there is also a non-
windowed version if you're not that into the whole staring at your Hardware thing
but I would make the argument that for someone who's into liquid cooling the
odds of them preferring the window one is pretty darn good now fractal has done
in recent years a much better job of packaging and the defin s is no
exception nice thick foam it's not soft
foam but the fact that it's nice and thick the fact that the case is heavy
but not overly heavy means that it should be in pretty good shape by the
time it gets to you you've got an accessory box right around there it's
got some screws inside also Reservoir
brackets o exciting and then a user guide which
usually they kind of suck no offense to a fractal design but let's give them a
chance to have it not suck oh a
builder's guide with optional steps you don't even have to do those
things fascinating okay actually actually not shabby all right so let's
open up the case and find out what's uh clanking around inside
there oh my side panels came undone in shipping so unlike the Define R5 the
Define s does not feature the latching
side panel mechanism however they have improved it in one regard so you can see
here they now use captive thumb screws on both the left and right side panel
which means that you won't lose them compared to the Define R5 it also
features a much wider side panel window which makes sense since in the front of
the case instead of having a whole bunch of hard drive cages which it should be
noted on the F R5 are actually removable and reconfigurable part of why it's more
expensive uh instead of having those you should actually have things like oh I
don't know a liquid filled Reservoir or something like that that's got like you
know UV glowy liquid all over the inside of it or something along those lines and
you can see they give you a ton like a metric butt ton of options in terms of
mounting whether you got one of those little dinky cylinder reses or one of
those super long cylinder reses it will feel at home in here now in terms of the
rest of the features it's pretty much open in here so you've got a large CPU
cutout you've got seven PCI slots you've got an included 140 mm fan at the back
and an additional one in the front you've got your power supply mounting
complete with anti vibrational little foam bits here and at the back and then
you've got this hard drive sled which we'll get into a little bit more later
at the bottom you've got mounting for a 120 or 140 mm fan as well as mounting
holes for the most popular pumps on the market so you can go go ahead and you can mount your DDC or your D5 pump
natively here which are the only ones I'd really recommend using especially
the D5 I'm not a huge fan of the DDC your front panel connectors are all
black except for the blue on the end of the USB 3.0 connector and all adequately
labeled with things like power LED positive power LED ground clearly
indicated you've got your cable management grommets not a ton of them
but I'd say enough so one for the eight pin one for the 24 pin and one for all
the sick graphic cards you're going to put in there and let's go ahead and have a look at
the front of the case we never really got to do the tour of the outside
because it went and opened itself for
us so at the front you've got the usual
brushed plasticky looking finish that we've seen on the Define r series for
quite some time except oh what's this it actually doesn't open at all so these
vents on the side here are going to be for your front intake and they are
actually quite spacious you can look right through them like that and other
than that that's nothing there is no 5 and a/4 in Baye there is no opening up
front door on the top you can see another cost-saving measure so we've got
front audio a reset switch a power switch that is illuminated I believe
yeah looks like it as well as two USB 3.0 ports but no additional two USB 2.0
ports also on the top we've got the same modu vent system from the Define R5 so
you can pop off one two or three of these depending on how many fans you have installed on that side and then
around on the other side we find not a whole lot of much of anything and the same goes for the back so let's go ahead
and pop off this side panel and hey look at that the fan spinning itself it's
like a windmill oh well that was shortlived all
right so on the back here we've got yes where that three and half in Drive
mounting cage would have wanted to go back to at some point here if I can
figure out yeah there we go so it goes in a little something like that no harm
no foul fractal design I forgive you for this thing falling out in shipping
international today do you have any idea how expensive that is so back here
you've got your drive mounting options I said no five and a quarter but that doesn't mean that you can't actually
mount a fair number of drives you can do three 3 and 1/2 in or 2 and 1/2 in
drives on these cages with their connectors oriented towards this side
that allows you to plug them into the ample Cable Management room back here so
you can go ahead and sneak your SATA data and SATA power connector in there
and then you can actually mount an additional two 2 and 1/2 in drives
directly under the CPU socket area right here so these also mount on little
removable sleds you screw them into that you pop them into the back huge
improvement over that one case I can't was it the Define R4 I think where you
had to actually screw the SSD in from the other side of the motherboard
another Improvement his fractal design is now including these velcro straps for
cable management you'll probably still need to use some zip ties but it's much
less of a huge deal once you've got at least a few reusable ones wouldn't mind
seeing another one here and I guess that's pretty much all there is to say
about the back there's enough room even at the in the narrowest portion for a 24
pin connector as long as you don't cross too many things over top of it but do
factor in that on the inside of the side panel is that noise dampening material
that we've seen on fractal designs other Silence optimized cases something to
noce if you want the windowed version you do pay a little bit more even though the funny thing is I'm pretty sure that
a piece of acrylic is actually cheap deer than the noise dampening material
they're using so I'm not quite sure if I understand the cost structure there back
around to the front you can put up to a triple 120 or triple 140 mm radiator
into the uh filtered there we go let's see if we can
figure out how to get that bad boy out filtered front
intake come out you
bastard
oh right
now this is what happens when you try and figure these cases out in real time
H it's magnetic it's actually kind of smart so it hinges on there and then
magnets on there so what did I say yeah triple 120s or triple 140s in the front
and then you can actually do up to a slim triple 140 or a thick triple 120 in
the top as well the reason for the slim requirement on the triple 140 is you're
going to have issues with motherboard clearance since those 140 mm radiators
are going to go somewhere over in the neighbor neighborhood of I think like heish I can't actually find the mounting
holes I'm not too stressed about it I don't stress about things these days so
I think that's pretty much it who is this case for well it's for water
coolers who basically wanted to Define r five and want to save 10 or 20 bucks
mission accomplished then fractal design mission accomplished speaking of mission
accomplished massdrop.com they've got all kinds of great deals if you never
heard of mass drop you should go check it out we've got a link in the video
description we also got a link in the lower third that's presumably sitting
under me right now but the whole idea behind it is members of their Community
find deals and then Mass drop Works directly with the manufacturers and
suppliers to get authentic merchandise at lower prices but there's a catch
there's the mass so we got the drop the price goes down but the mass means the
more people buy it the lower the price goes to a predefined limit we've
actually got a feature dropped for you guys today ah yes we've got a Cooler
Master V12 00 power supply for as low as
239 shipped to the US so that's an 80
plus Platinum 1200 wat power supply for
a pretty significant discount so again guys if you want to
check out that deal or anything else on massdrop.com check out the link in the
video description and as always like the video if you liked it dislike it if you
disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than all of that also linked in the video
description is a link to our Forum where you can discuss the video with the more
civilized side of the internet a place where you can buy cool Linus Tech tips
t-shirts not like this one this one's kind of vintage you know it's like the
classic lonus Tech tips t-shirts uh but we have other Linus Tech tips t-shirts
there and a place where you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small
Kickback whenever you buy Define s's on Amazon or whatever else the case may be
thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe bet you guys thought I was
going to drop it didn't you I wasn't going to do that