Gadgetory

a portable power bank wireless AP SD card and USB reader for your mobile devices check the link in the video description to learn more about the adata - drive air AE 400 welcome to my unboxing and overview of the fractal design Arc MIDI r2 which takes pretty much everything that was good about the original art committee 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 it in our committee 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 airflow with a sleek and minimalistic 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 top panel design for maximum airflow which it was before as well and the stylish windowed side panel made from acrylic allows you to see your components that's their other way of saying that it has a window to separate hard drive cages can be moved around individual hard drive cage feature vibration dampening rubber grommets and three high quality 140 millimeter 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 well 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 and shipping speaking of hard foam and hating it 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 800 D 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 is sort of like a dual 140 millimeter size you've also got a little air intake here so you'll get a little bit more airflow for the front however I don't think that's going to be a major factor in cooling for this case because most of its 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 millimeter Clint fan included in the front although there's room to mount an additional one but we'll also see here is a wide variety of different mounting holes these will allow you to mount things like dual 120 millimeter radiators in the front of the case which you might say by the way it goes in like this click which you might say well line is how will you have room for that I'll show you once we open it up to five and a quarter inch bays around out the clean front bezel that looks very similar to the original here we don't know 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 i/o 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 to USB 3 ports which is an improvement over the old one which only had one as well as integrated fan control with 5 volt 7 volt and 12 volt switches on this side if we find not a whole lot just a plain side panel and then on the other side we find the win side panel that was alluded to 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 but because there's air bubbles I don't know 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 smoke 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 there you go it has a bit of a bit of a different look to it so on the back we find another 140 millimeter included Faneuil though with optional mounts for 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 a noise dampening foam around it so to give you guys some idea just how smoked that side panel is I'm gonna 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 millimeter fan included but you can see there are a butt ton of different mounting points for different sized fans so you could put up to a triple 120 millimeter radiator up here without any difficulty but you would be sacrificing some of that five and a quarter inch 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 gonna 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 millimeter mounting points as well as triple 120 millimeter mounting points you can actually put another pun 40 over here should you so desire although I don't know that that's something that I would necessarily recommend sacrificing a five and a quarter inch pay 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 bail 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 we'll look at this guys look at this in profile not much airflow can get through here and you don't mind having cables 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 and it would be great yeah there we go so now you get more free-flowing airflow especially if you're not installing all five drives in there so fractal design is saying they have twenty six millimeters 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 five and a quarter inch drive cages on the back we find the two-and-a-half inch 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 fractals 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 a single molex for power and then it also is able to control up to 3 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 8 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 well I've moved them before apparently I was ready to go with those at the front are the standard fare 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 divining 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 subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos don't forget to leave a comment on the video let me know what you thought liked the video and share it with anyone who you think should buy this case which is anyone who appreciates simple Swedish design and 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