this thing is huge it's here it is the
first of its kind in North America this is the fractal design Define XL so this
is as you may or may not be able to
guess an extra large version of the
Define which is on its third revision so you can buy a Define R3 or a Define XL
so let's go through the bullet points on the front really quick here obviously
you can read them if you so desire but here's one of the big highlights boom 10
inter internal 3 and 1/2 in hard drives that's huge that's awesome you've got
noise absorbing material just like the Define R3 thermal chamber design we've
come to expect their modu vent technology which I'll show you when we
open up the case as well as an optimal air flow cooling system so two front so
included you have 40 140 mm fan uh one
top 180 mm fan and one rear 140 mm fan
you can check out what you can get that is not included to add to the case over
here on the other side we see all of the supported motherboard sizes which is
pretty much everything although you'd have to be on something pretty good to
put a mini ITX board in a case this size it would be like this big so don't do
that and I'm going to just open up the box and we will
continue this shortly now the reason I
chose this one out of all the ones in our warehouse to unbox is that it wasn't
labeled with a color so I figured if we unbox it then we'll also find out what
color it is it comes in two colors black and titanium gray it also comes with a
user manual which is pretty basic but if
you've installed a PC and a case before you should be able to figure it out
reasonably well so there's the packing
material it's a cardboard reinforced
with h well not really reinforced styrofoam reinforced with cardboard for
some puncture resistance as well as some
rigidity and the cardboard is pretty good you got like a dual walled uh
cardboard going on here all right so let's get the case out of its plastic
sheath and find out what we've got going
on in here this is a very large case they weren't kidding when they called it
the XL because it's not gum but it's really
big here we go we'll use me for scale
next to it here so you can see a person is quite small compared to the definer
so we pull off the front and we can see that this is the titanium gray version
of the Define XL so the black one would
be a little bit darker it would uh be more like the finish on the rest of the
case although you would still have that brushed look to the front of it just
like the R3 we've got most of our
business stuff up at the very top of the case that means you got your microphone
and headphones EA 4 USB 2.0 ports as
well as your power switch once you open up the door you will find Some Noise
isolating as well as uh I assume dust
trapping no it couldn't be cuz I'm going to go through there no the intakes are
here so some noise isolating foam you've got four 5 and 1/4 in Bays which come
off quite easily as you can see all you do is remove the little Tab and then you
can also put them back in should you so desire just pull it like that that's
kind of neat actually and then oh behind this one look at that you've got room to
mount a 120 mm fan so because most
people only install 1 5 and a/4 in device that makes a lot of sense so you
can put up to three these look like 140 and then this
looks like a 120 three fans in the front you can see the one has been included
and I think that pretty much does it for the front so the intakes as I mentioned
see you've got dust filters right over the fence the intakes are actually all
along the side so when you've when you've closed the front of the
case that's where those fans are going to get their air flow from all right
let's take uh actually here we'll look at the back
while we take off the thumb screws here
uh no no we'll look at the side first wait ah modu vent I promised I'd talk
about this this is a modu vent you see how you can't see through
it well that's why it's modu vent because right now they've got a piece of
their noise isolating material screwed in so you just remove that you mount a
140 mm or a 120 mm fan there and boom
now you've got air flow instead of noise isolation so that's what makes it mod
you go ahead and pull off the side panel
here I hope I can figure out how the mechanism works for the side panel on
camera cuz sometimes I have trouble with those okay there we go it came off well
there's our noise dampening stuff it's quite a bit thicker than what I've seen
on the Define R2 although I haven't seen an R3 in person but uh there you go
that's how you remove it so let's go ahead and put that away the wow the
panels are quite quite heavy they are
steel panels and they do have the uh the
noise damping material on them you can see they're quite sturdy
and we better take a break I got a phone call and here we are on the inside of
the case so the first thing we're going to notice is our accessory so this is
giving us a little inventory here of everything that's included I guess
that's why that information was not in the manual we've also got a fan
controller a 5 and 1/4 to 3 and 1/2 in bezel in case you want to install a
floppy drive or a media card reader as well as some cable ties very nice thank
you fractal and then what else do we have in here here's all of our front
panel connectors which should be pretty much run-of-the-mill I think because we
saw everything that was at the front oh this is nice though look uh all of the
uh the switches are individually sleeved
just like that so they're all going to be nice and black inside your case you
won't be able to see them against the black interior we've got HD audio as
well as ac97 two USB as well as our eata
plug so that's all taken care of and then here is the nicely sleeved look at
that high quality sleeving you can't see the color of the wires at all behind it
so you got your nicely sleeved three pin connector for your front fan here are
the 10 3 and 1/2 in drive base so these
come on little sleds you can install a 3 and 1/2 in or a 2 and 1/2 in device on
here quite easily so this case is entirely SSD ready you can install 10
ssds out of the box the other six are down here now as a water cooling
Enthusiast the first thing I think when I look down here is actually that it
probably wouldn't be that hard to remove the rivets from these bottom cages and
mount a radiator down there so that would be an interesting project for our
power supply we've got four little rubber mounts so any power supply
whether you've got bottom cooling top cooling however you want to mount it
will be able to get adequate air flow although what I would recommend is
mounting it with the fan on the bottom so that it can pull air up its own
dedicated cool air through the dust filter here which can be pulled out too
clean just like that and uh yeah so it
can sit on the noise isolating rubber mounts and what else do we have inside
so here this is what what is this this is interesting we've got another modu
vent here although I'm not 100% sure
what it's for huh okay well you can take out this
square piece and that gives you full unrestricted access to the power supply
there goes my other side panel which I had unscrewed helpfully for myself just
in case I wanted to take it off for you guys and then most of the cables are
actually going to go up through here so we've got a little rubber grommet you
can see the quality of the silicone they're using here is very high so
you're not going to be putting things through it and then pulling them out and have it stay in place no you're going to
be able to Mush these around and they'll go right back where they belong and then
you can uh yeah so most of the cables will go up that way where they're going
to come out is a whole other ball of wax so we'll look at that when we get around
to the other side of the case here's that 1880 mm fan that's going to be
cooling your Moss fets as well as drawing any hot air away from your CPU
socket area speaking of the CPU socket you have a removable cover so that you
can access the back of the motherboard and install aftermarket CPU coolers
without taking the motherboard out here's another 140 mm fan here in the
back just like the one in the front we've got seven expansion slots so that
means you're going to fit standard ATX Micro ATX extended ATX but none of those
weird XL ATX type things we've got one extra PCI slot here just in case you've
got a cold cathode kit or a fan controller something that you want to
dedicate a PCI slot in the back to but you don't want to take up room to
install things on your motherboard just go ahead and mount that right there
here's all of our rubber grommets all along the side and up along the top so
we can do SATA we can do uh Power we can
do 24 pin we can do eight pin and that's all going to come up in a nice
convenient location along there so our 5 and 1/4 in is all fairly straight
forward here we can actually oh yeah there's the 5 and 1/4 in to 3 and 1/2 in
adapter is actually mounted in there by default so you could just remove that or
you could leave it in and you could install the uh adapter for the front
panel that they include in the accessory box did we look at the back of the case
yet I don't think we looked at the back of the case yet so there's the fan
there's some venting there's more venting along the side panel there's two
holes for water cooling although those are pretty small you probably only be
able to get about 38 in tubing through there uh the power supply Mount is right
here and then you got some more venting there so fairly straightforward very
clean uh that what fractal is becoming known for is the designs are just clean
everything has a purpose and there you go there's how you
access the CPU socket look at that it stays on too so you can just put that
back up there it's got a little thumb screw no
problem now you do have adequate room behind the motherboard tray to Route
cables that's been one of my biggest complaints about some of the cases I've
seen that have you know little holes to to to Route cables but they actually
don't have enough space back here to it so the side panel is way out here which
means you've got like a good inch of space behind that motherboard trade
route 24 pin ATX connectors or whatever it is that you need to Route behind the
motherboard now there's the reset switch there's that front 140 mm fan I think
that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the Define XL paint
finish actually on the parts that are not the front looks quite adequate it's
going to be quite fingerprint resistant it's not the best I've ever seen But the
value of this case for the features that it comes with is just outstanding you
get the black interior actually I'm pretty impressed so far I haven't seen
this one in person yet I had only seen it in photos and uh it looks really good
it looks like they've got another winner on their hands thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Define XL from
fral design and don't forget to subscribe to Line's Tech tips