Fractal Design Arc Midi R2 Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,344 words · ~11 min read
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want a portable power bank Wireless AP SD card and USB reader for your mobile
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devices check the link in the video description to learn more about the ada8
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DH Drive air ae400 welcome to my unboxing and overview of the fractal
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design Arc midi R2 which takes pretty much everything that was good about the
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original Arc midi and well improves upon
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it so what they were going for was not only an excellent air Cooling case which
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The Arc midi was in fact my wife's PC is still running in an arc midi but they
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wanted to add flexible liquid cooling support to it as well because whether
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you're using an all-in-one or a completely custom Loop many of the kids
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today are adding water cooling to their systems so in terms of the overall specs
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we've got a pretty nondescript Plain Jane Brown box maximum airf flow with a
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sleek and ministic front panel design in fact they haven't changed that much
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their front intake now includes an easy to clean dust filter this was one of my
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complaints about the original Arc was it just left kind of like horrible dust
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rings on it and there wasn't really a whole lot you could do about it front interface includes USB 3 which the old
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one did as well pop panel design for maximum air flow which it was before as
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well and the stylish windowed side panel made from acrylic asow you to see your
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components that's their other way of saying that it has a window two separate
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hard drive cages can be moved around individual hard drive cage feature
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vibration dampening rubber grommets and three highquality 140 mm silent fans and
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extensive water cooling support in the top panel and behind the front panel so
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I'm not going to spend too much time opening the
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box that my friends is how we do it and
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we find a hard foam which is not my
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favorite I do like to see soft or closed
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cell Foams but I understand that from a cost savings perspective sometimes hard
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Foams are a necessary evil from the manufacturing side and as long as
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they're reasonably welld designed they can protect the case
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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
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speaking of hardam and hating it um at least they've gone for about an inch of
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thickness on the corners here so I've definitely seen worse let's go ahead and
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open this bad boy up so the first thing
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we're going to see I guess is the bottom of the case this is unusual we never do
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this so it's got two different sizes of feet large ones on the front of the case
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small ones on the back as well as a removable fan filter which you can see
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you can simply slide out like this not too long which was a problem with older
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cases particularly the Corsair 800d where the fan filter on the bottom was
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enormous so it meant that you had to slide it out that far in order to get it
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out which meant you usually hit the wall or some other sort of obstacle so this
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one's sort of like a dual 140 mm size
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you've also got a little air intake here so you'll get a little bit more airf
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flow for the front however I don't think that's going to be a major factor in
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cooling for this case because most of it going to be coming through the Fairly
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open front mesh since the front panel is the part of the case that we're
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repairing here we might as well show you how this front piece goes on so this is
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what they meant by easy to remove and easy to clean it's one solid piece of
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metal mesh with a sort of foam filter
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behind it that should allow air to pass through pretty easily but will also
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provide very effective dust catching you
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can probably take this whole thing and just kind of dip it in water and soap
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and wash it out and you can see we've got one 140 mm CL fan included in the
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front although there's room to mount an additional one but what you'll also see
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here is a wide variety of different mounting holes these will allow you to
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mount things like dual 120 mm radiators in the front of the case which you might
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say by the way it goes in like this click uh which you might say well lonus
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how will you have room for that I'll show you once we open it up two 5 and
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1/4 in Bay round out the clean front bezel that looks very similar to the
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original there we go now that's clicked into place on the top we find once again
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very very open open free airflow so that
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is the arc concept as well as IO including a reset switch that can't be
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accidentally pressed by a cat that jumps on your case a microphone and headphone
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jack power as well as a power indicator LED two usb3 ports which is an
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improvement over the old one which only had one as well as integrated fan
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control with 5vt 7vt and 12vt switches
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on this side we find not a whole lot just a plain side panel and then on the
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other side we find the windowed side panel that was alluded to in in a very
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verbose Fashion on the outside of the box and it has a protective plastic
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cover that I actually don't seem to be able to remove so the good news is your
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window will look as good as it does out of the box forever the bad news is it
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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
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one on the inside anyway it's a bit of a frosted sort of well not frosted it's a
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smoked smoked panel so it's going to look a little bit darker inside it's up
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to the individual whether they prefer that or the clear side panel but uh
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there you go it has a bit of a a bit of a different look to it so on the back we
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find another 140 mm included fan although with optional mounts for a 120
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mil as well as seven PCI slots and then
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an additional auxiliary one where you can put something like a fan controller or whatever else a bottom mounted power
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supply has noise dampening foam around it so to give you guys some idea just
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how smoked that side panel is I'm going to go ahead and remove the inside piece
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and you can look at me with or without
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the smoke there you go so it makes things a little bit darker but if you
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have lighting effects inside your case it's probably not going to affect things
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too much but if you don't have lighting effects then it will look significantly
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dimmer inside once we get inside the case we find out how all of this is
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supposed to work so up here in the top there's that flexible radiator support
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so there's another 140 mm fan included
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but you can see there are a butt ton of
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different mounting points for different ized fan so you could put up to a triple
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120 mm radiator up here without any
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difficulty but you would be sacrificing some of that 5 and 1/4 in expansion now
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in order to make this easier all you have to do is remove two screws here in
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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
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then you can remove the entire top of the case just like you could on the V1
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chassis so there you have it so here's
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dual 140 mm mounting points as well as
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triple 120 mm mounting points you can actually
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put another 140 over here should you so
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desire although I don't know that that's something that I would necessarily
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recommend sacrificing a 5 and a/ qu inch Bay for now in the front of the case
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that's where things are also quite interesting because you can remove this
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top one so you can fit a reasonably long graphics card in here in fact anything
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that's on the market currently pretty much without removing it but you can
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remove it to give you the option to install even longer graphics cards in
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order to give yourself more options at the front of the case you can also check
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this out screws down here remove the second hard drive cage meaning that you
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can only Mount B you can mount things
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creatively pretty much at that point so you could go ahead and put ssds on the
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back of the motherboard tray more on that later but you could also put nice
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thick radiators here in the front without any difficulty at all more
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flexibility for the drive cages though if you're one of those people who says
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well look at this guys look at this in profile not much air flow can get
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through here and you don't mind having cabl sticking out the back of your hard
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drive area you can actually check this in this way instead of the default which
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is sideways mounted if I could figure out how to do
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it then that would be great there we go so now you get more
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free flowing airf flow especially if you're not installing all five drives in
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there so fractal design is saying they have 26 mm of cable management space
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behind the motherboard tray I believe it
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so there's quite a lot of space you can easily fit a 24 pin cable back here
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they've also gone with what I really like to see which is a much larger
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grommet down here at the bottom than the ones that are up here along the side
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because most of the cables are going to have to come through here before they go up to the eight pin which also has
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rubber grommets back there or the eight pin that's positioned where I hate
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having it positioned in the middle at the top 24 pin PCI Express as well as
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anything that goes up here to your 5 and 1/4 in Drive cages on the back we find
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the 2 and 1/2 in SSD mounts that I talked about before these are very basic
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SSD mounts and you actually have to screw into the bottom of the ssds from
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where the motherboard would sit so it's not as elegant as fractal implementation
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of this feature on other cases and I'd really recommend just using velcro or
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double-sided tape or something to stick those on there also on the back of the
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case we find the power as well as the
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splitter leads for the built-in fan controller so it uses is a single MOX
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for power and then it also is able to control up to three fans using a simple
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voltage control and not providing any RPM
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monitoring and so there's lots of room for cable management in the back not as
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many cable tie Loops as I'd like to see so there's only a couple rows of them
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here and here I like to see some cable tie Loops leading up to the eight pin if
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I was to criticize something about the cable management in this case which is
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of course what you people pay me good money to do internal hookups are oh all
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right well I've moved them before apparently I was ready to go with those
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at the front are the standard fair so there's a USB 3 connector and it's sort
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of standard bulky form as well like to see this check this out a USB 2
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connector so you can't hook them both up at the same time but this gives you the
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option to plug into USB 2 if your motherboard doesn't support USB 3
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without a weird funky adapter HD audio is included as well as your power switch
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reset switch and hard drive LED and power LED all of these are black cables
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which is a definite plus last but not
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least this is something I've been forgetting on a lot of cases lately
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let's go ahead and check out what they include in terms of accessories but I'm
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going to go ahead and use my diving powers to
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predict screws okay so nothing unexpected some
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screws some cable ties and not a whole
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lot else although they do include one of those handy dandy little adapters so
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that you can use your screwdriver to put in the there they are the motherboard
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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
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case which is anyone who appreciates
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simple Swedish design and um unlike Ikea
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things that don't just immediately fall apart although you wouldn't know that looking at what I've done to it here
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he