Gadgetory

fractal design has had a busy year for case launches they've had the define C the defined mini C case and they also had the Mushaf I see all three of these enclosures fall into the category of not garbage which is pretty rare for cases in the last year so today they're launching the define r6 which we are reviewing and hopefully it also falls into the not garbage category of cases before getting to those that this coverage is brought to you by EB GA and their 1080 T is c2 which we've recommended fairly highly for its build quality and the icx sensors which are kind of fun to play with you can check our full sc2 review for the 1080i if you're curious to learn more or you can click the link in the description below to find the product page for the 1080i sc2 so this is the define r6 following up the define r5 which was a really popular case and just again the mesh if I see came out not too long ago we actually liked that case a good bit the define C had a high build quality good kale management features all that stuff it's a little on the warm side and not a lot of room to improve compared to the massif IC but there's two options there that were both pretty good build quality also a rarity lately this is the r6 this one comes in a bit more expensive at $150 so it's quite a bit more than it's about two times the measure of IC and it's got a couple of more flagship type features to it so to walk you through the basics the define r6 has all of the marketing check box elements except for RGB LEDs will all mourn the loss I guess but other than that it does have tempered glass it does have vertical GPU support which we've been pretty you know how we feel about that I think over the last few months power supply shroud all that stuff semi modular design couple cool new features though the side panel actually mounts in a way that is not old or idiotic and it's mounting there's been a lot of that this year as well so it just pops out like that like it just pulls and there's a release and that's all there is to it and closed back in so I actually really like that it's a small feature but at this point the smallest of the accounts with cases especially when the $150 so job well done fractal for making a side panel that actually has a good removal mechanism something that like feels like it makes sense when you're using it they have a button in the back that is kind of reminiscent of what NZXT just did now they're not copying each other these cases take a while to develop NZXT probably launched there as I'm sure fractal was like uh we've been working on that same thing for like the last six months so they're not copying each other I don't think but they do have a button on the back like NZXT NZXT is pops off the left side panel fractals button pops up the top side the top panel now you'll notice when I pushed it you probably didn't really see anything happening on camera that's because to actually remove it you still have to get up in there from inside the case so it's a nice idea but it doesn't have the same tactile feel that NZXT is does where you can push it and a hole shoots off the side like a rocket so yeah it's not not the best implementation really not that much different than just not having the button and pushing it up with some clips so that could use work but it was a cool idea and we're happy to see fragile at least trying stuff that's mechanical and different and not poorly executed to a point of being hugely detrimental I mean if that's your main complaint about the case that you push a button and there's no spring tension release or anything like that if that's the main complaint you're in pretty good shape so not a big deal but it's definitely something they can improve on other core features of the case other than the mechanical stuff I use this bit more mechanical you can pull out this shroud on the front half of the case it's basically a hard drive shroud you can pull that out you pull all the drive cages out and you can just leave it basically open air similar to something like well most of the cases right now really where they have their drives hidden in the bottom front under the shroud and then the rest is all open you could do more liquid cooling that way bigger radiator support in terms of thickness all that kind of stuff we did test it for airflow with all the cages removed versus stock which is how I have it set up right now and you'll see those thermal numbers in a bit but other than that they've done a good job with the EPS 12 volt hole placement that's something like some cases I've overlooked this year as well so they have them in two key locations which will cover pretty much every board they've also got sort of standard rubber grommets things like that stuff that's not too important or innovative overall but the big thing here is something you can't really see as much as you can feel which is the build quality is actually good the panel thickness comes together in a way that there's some rigidity to the case it doesn't feel like it's flimsy and falling apart and the construction quality is good the airflow paths are okay as you'll see in the thermals they're just kind of okay which for a case that's marketed as more silent focused and acoustics focused is actually good I mean if you kind of weight the scale and your focus is on either airflow or noise you can't do both then if you're doing okay average and the one that you're not focusing on that's really about where you want to be you can't really be good at both noise suppression and the high airflow doesn't really work that way generally speaking so they're okay they're kind of okay with air flow the reason they're in a decent spot with air flow relative to their marketing which is noise focused is because there's about maybe an inch 3/4 of an inch side and take on the front and it is on both sides unlike other cases this year not sure why that's so hard and they have two fans pre-installed in the front they also have one fan pre-installed and back there's not much point and buy an extra fans here it comes with pretty much every slot populated that you could populate short of going closed loop route and just putting better fans on it for the sake of better fans so they actually do populate all the slots it does matter it does help and the ventilation is good enough that in a noise focused case you'll be fine but I mean again not going to lead any charge because ultimately that front is still solid there's no match there it's not gonna lead and thermals while having that front on it but that's not the goal and the reason I bring this up is because you look at something like the H 500 P where we have marketing materials from Coolermaster saying guaranteed high air volume case or you look at something like the BitFenix and so which had marketing material that talks about these hidden ventilation ports on the front panel which is like hidden in the sense of an invisibility cloak you can't see them because they don't exist those marketing materials are objectively misleading or false so we knock them for that in fractals case they're not really marketing high airflow at least and the review guide the materials we've received the marketing noise suppression so that's we're gonna be looking at most now to that end you pop off the other panels and they've got this sort of it's it's the usual foam it's maybe a millimeter a half a millimeter thick it's got kind of a canvas finish on it theoretically this will primarily help with things like oil wine high-pitched noises stuff where you've got a really short wave small wave form that just hits all the divots on the side and breaks apart and so hopefully that kind of stops most the higher pitched higher frequency noises from reaching you or it mitigates them the only way to stop lower frequency noises is thick cowling something like five millimeter aluminum stuff like that which is unreasonable for most cases so yeah they're targeting a suppression of the annoying wine noises which is kind of what you want to do and let the metal handle the rest the low words and things like that so yeah let's get into the testing we have a full written review of this as always that is written by Patrick Lathan who worked on the case primarily he has a couple of other opinions that are worth reading linked in the article below I'm going to focus on the thermals and the noise for you and we'll get to the conclusion so as always our testing methodology will be detailed in the article linked in the description below we are primarily referencing temperature as delta T over ambient so it is DT over ambient meaning moving ambient from the measurement and for extra tests we removed the front panel not just the door but the entire front panel which is something we're doing standard now we mounted the GPU vertically we open the top Maji event as fractal calls it and we reconfigured to the open layout removing the hard drive cages and the shroud in the front as usual we're starting with only the temperatures to the define r6 and it's different configurations then we'll look at comparative data with other cases average CPU temperature during the torture test was 56 degrees Celsius but dropped to 45 point four degrees with the whole front panel removed this is a newly standardized test for us and helps determine how much Headroom a case has to thermally improve its design we'll have to look at the resulting noise levels later though to see what kind of acoustic impact there is by removing the front panel because it's obviously not a realistic scenario this temperature drop is to be expected with all the noise damping and baffles in the way of the airflow opening the top had a much less dramatic but still significant impact on lowered CPU temperatures which is enough fact we've seen before vertical GPU mounting gets the radiative heat from the backplate away from the CPU cooler further aiding and lower in CPU temperatures but we'll have to see what it does for the GPU in a moment as for fractals open layout where in the drive cages are removed and the side trout is relocated the layout had no real effect on CPU temperature so for our configuration with air cooling we're just not really seeing a change you might as well leave them in there there are certain situations where you want to remove them though primarily with custom water loops and things of that nature fractals define our six next appears in our comparative CPU benchmarks 56° is around where the NZXT s340 elites Coolermaster h 500 PE and stock define SI scored middle of the chart temperatures that aren't really impressive by themselves but are made impressive primarily and only by the RO sixes emphasis on silence this becomes a question of marketing when the product like the BitFenix ends over the H 500 P claims to offer high airflow and low temperatures it needs to actually do so define R 6 in the marketing materials we received never claimed outright top formants and thermals it's a silence focused case and so we'll look at those in a moment if the case can deliver lower than average noise levels while maintaining average - slightly below average temperatures it'll be in an okay position and then it's up to the user to make a decision whether that makes sense for their build or not the stock mesh if I see and then be quiet more expensive dark bass 700 were slightly cooler than this but the competing dark bass pro 900 and pure bass 600 in terms of thermal and acoustic performance were both warmer opening the top cover though pushed the r6 up quite a few spots better than anything that defined see achieved with the front panel on stock bands and slightly better than the Corsair 270 are removing the front panel expectedly demonstrates that the r6 could run way cooler with an open face but we'll see if the enclosure makes up for this in acoustic performance is again ultimately the marketing objective average GPU temperature was 50 6.4 degrees in the stock torture test which only dropped about 3 degrees when the front panel was removed not much room for improvement when looking at just the define r6 is numbers here neither opening the top cover nor the open layout had a significant impact on GPU temperature this makes sense as neither is particularly beneficial to the airflow path for the GPU specifically anyway the vertical GPU mount caused a huge temperature increase as usual - seventy two point seven degrees Celsius delta T over ambient with a definite decrease in frequency as the GPU diode hit 93 degrees in its actual temperature we have a frequency overtime plot for that so we are dropping clocks pretty hard here as the hard throttle wall for NVIDIA Pascal architecture is about 84 degrees Celsius and at 82 we start dropping clocks at 60 you start dropping clocks and so on so this is actually driving pretty hard since Fraxel sent us the proper PCIe riser cable we didn't have to strap everything together with zip ties and the GPU and CPU coolers didn't even make contact like they had been in some other cases so this is just how it is with air cooled components in this configuration as we've been saying for six months now vertical GPU mounts for open face cards just don't really make sense they perform awfully and you'd ideally use the for an open-loop configuration as the liquid makes up for any radiative or airflow disadvantages since the GPU is much more aggressive about altering clock speed to lower temperature the differences between cases are smaller on our GPU comparison chart fifty six point four degrees Celsius delta T over ambient is just 0.2 degrees warmer than the metruff I see and defined C with the extra Noctua intake bands and so we can call these functionally the same it's still on the warm side for what we consider decent both the be quiet dark base 702 and dark base pro 900 have lower GPU temperatures and the cheaper pure base 600 is roughly equivalent we mentioned these because they are noise focused a lot of this comes down to that shroud although the enclosure gets decent air flow into it roughly on par with the case that as to 200 millimeter fans in the front no less the shroud is still trapping some of the heat from the open face card despite that ventilation port in the top of the shroud there is not much that can be done about it aside from focus any more air flow toward the bottom of the chassis while looping 3dmark fire striking extreme test average GPU temperature was fifty nine point five degrees over ambient about on par with the BitFenix and so and corsair spec o for this is a little bit embarrassing for a $150 case we define our six as its scoring alongside one of the worst cases we've reviewed lately the dark bass 700 was significantly cooler at fifty four point six degrees Celsius but both the stock matchup IC and define c were warmer thanks to their limited stock fans this could be improved again by adding fans as you would expect and you can see our reviews for each of those to see how we added fans and what they did rendering our blended test on the cpu average CPU delta T over ambient was thirty six point nine degrees that's cooler than any case we've run that test on except for these Silverstone RL zero six including the dark bass pro 900 and dark bass 700 the our six is definitely capable of keeping an air-cooled CPU at safe temperatures under this kind of load however rendering on the GPU average GPU delta T over ambient was twenty-nine point two degrees relative to other cases it fared better than it did in fire strike but still not enough to compete with the to be quiet cases the r6 did cool better than the massif I see and define see and a beat the Enzo by three degrees this teaches us something important the r6 primarily starts struggling with GPU and CPU thermals when both are under load it doesn't have enough pathways for hot air to escape the enclosure which is something that we don't always see pop up as an issue because some of these cases are more capable of exhausting the heat than others an open phase card will always require some form of escape for all that air that's being shot into the case in the stock configuration for noise levels with the fans at max speed the r6 reached 33.8 DBA all the baffles and padding as you can see here really do something they actually worked in fractals marketing delivers with the top cover opened noise levels increased measurably but not necessarily audibly to 34.9 DBA and with the front panel removed completely it jumped to thirty nine point seven DBA 33.8 decibels is almost exactly the same as the pure bass 600 and the only case that's quieter at max rpm is the Thermaltake core p3 because it has no fans so the case in terms of build quality is actually very good it's well done it has a good structural feel to it you can't really flex it like you can with a lot of cases and although you're not gonna sit there and try and flex your case or bow it or anything like that the point is that it's actually built with quality materials and it doesn't feel like cheap crap that you're gonna throw away in here so they've done well there and this is something fractal is done well with the defined C and to some extent the metruff IC as well so that hasn't changed that we still would praise fractal for their build quality and tooling of this case the noise levels are also pretty good they've done well with isolating noise that can be annoying with these foam pads they actually do work as we've seen now one thing we don't show is frequency spectrum analysis that would show you if we had the configuration the test setup for it would show you that yes lower frequency noises are still going to be heard at about the same level as on pretty much every case except for five millimeter thick but the higher frequency noises like coil wine are dealt with pretty handily by this material on the side panels and the top panel so fractals done well there and that fits their marketing where they fall behind a bit is still thermals this is acceptable to some extent because they're not saying that they're a high airflow case they don't guarantee high air volume they don't say they have hidden vents in the panel's they're saying they're good at noise suppression and they are so it's okay to be a bit behind in thermals if you're not marketing them as a leading selling point fractal ends up about middle of the chart for some of the thermal tests they're pretty bad and others vertical mounted to open-face GPU we absolutely don't recommend and we also didn't recommend it for the Vue 71 or any other case that had that option you can do open-loop if you wanted to use it the CPU and GPU both being under intensive load is pretty hard on the case it has trouble getting rid of the heat once it collects it because you've really got no good escape for the all of that dissipating energy from the GPU down here so what's it do it's gonna radiate up off the backplate the fans will disperse it throughout the case you've got this glass insulation on the side and the only way really to get it out is eventually to get sucked through the CPU cooler if it's an air cooler like a tower cooler and then pushed out the back of the case that increases your CPU temperatures a bit as well and the GPU has its own problems with the CPU cooler at our cooler radiating heat off of it hitting the backplate so it does struggle a bit when both are under heavy load however it still functions it's not really throttling only starts dropping clocks hard when your side mounted with a vertical GPU not the worst thing in the world so yeah overall fractal has a case that is average to slightly below average in thermal performance however if you weighed it relative to its marketing which is what we do it's doing decently for thermals compared to its noise performance it's acoustic performance and the build quality pretty much makes up for everywhere that fractal falls short thermally so they've definitely got some stuff they can improve on that's what you want in any product but it's something we could recommend at its price point which the last like four cases reviewed I couldn't say that for so this is refreshing and it's nice to have a case that doesn't suck and is actually good build quality as far as their animals if you really care about that kind of thing you could buy better fans it's $150 you probably have some money anyway so you can improve it a bit if you had to or you pop up the top then you increase your noise levels by 1.5 DBA and you decrease the temperature significantly so those are options as always if you want to read more about this case click the article links in the description below for additional opinions and notes from Patrick you can subscribe for more we have a couple other cases coming up and go to patreon.com/scishow and exit stops out directly we restored our gamers nexus net to 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