Gadgetory

hotspot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer more secure and fully private click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing of something that we saw for the first time at Computex this is the fractal design arc mini not to be confused with the arc mid D arc mini r2 so this is an M ATX case that is designed to be extremely compact and accept a metric what ton of cooling here and hard drives but not necessarily at the same time so in terms of the packing material we've got a hard foam which is never particularly impressive but I don't really mind it as much with smaller cases because they tend to weigh less and are therefore less likely to damage the foam in transit due to their weight although you can see that this piece barely made it so you can see there's hey this is why I don't like hard foam soft foam wouldn't have had that problem next up we've got the user's manual which we are going to promptly throw away because I have a reviewers guide haha which is just as good as a user's manual if not better next up we've got a plastic sheathing that covers it and in theory keeps it safe in transit and that got boring so let's pick up on the actual case so starting on the outside we have that typical clean Swedish design that we get from fractal design which incidentally happens to be a Sweden based company so on the front we find two five and a quarter inch base although the use of these is incredibly optional as you're going to find out once we open it up we have this piece of plastic that holds this front panel in place as well as the removable fan filter that is to be cleaned by running water over it you know when you clean it anyway so it's got foam okay anyway there's two 120 millimeter fans of which one of them is included so that's their silent artoo series fans and I actually really like this implementation here with a nice heavy fan filter it feels very robust got a nice little fractal design logo here and then just a simple front that is very very clean very very simple and all you got to do is put it a couple screws to install a fan and you are done on the top we find the usual suspects in terms of IO we've got a reset switch a microphone port a headphone jack a power switch with a power led as well as two USB 3.0 ports and an integrated fan controller five seven and 12 volts are all supported the right-hand side of the case is completely plain as we'd expect from practical design and the left-hand side of the case has a nice smoked window that I've removed the outside layer of plastic off but not the inside layer at the back of the case we find another 120 millimeter fan slot there's actually a total of seven possible fan slots I owe and a four plus one arrangement for i/o I would have preferred to have that fifth one below it but it would have made the case that much taller so I understand why they did this the way they did you can put things like fans bee controllers and stuff here you've got a little padded bottom power supply mount that also has padding on the bottom here and then at the top just like on previous Arc Series cases well I wouldn't have been funny of that slipped and fell alright let's go ahead and do that you've got another removable cleanable fan filter that comes off the entire top of the case and this serves a couple of purposes number one is functional number two is aesthetic because they've used an offset configuration for the top fan holes so you can see you can mount either a triple 120 millimeter radiator and yes it supports a thick triple 120 millimeter radiator because of the way that it's offset so the motherboard is actually over here so as long as you don't have any tall components it can sit right over top of the motherboard or it can support a dual 140 millimeter radiator in the top and it doesn't really matter because of the gaps here so you can see that because there's a lot of space here it doesn't matter what the spacing of your radiator happens to be I did miss one thing about the outside I'm sorry there was another fan filter down here on the bottom not my favorite implementation because it is a longer fan filter but it serves its purpose you know fairly effectively so it does allow filtration of both the power supply intake which is isolated from the rest of the system's air flow as well as this bottom 120 millimeter fan mount that could also be equipped with a radiator so let's go ahead and pull the side panel off I like smoked side panels I think they look good it's you know your typical fractal design solid build quality as far as the side panel is concerned not an excessive amount of flex by any stretch I'll just give you guys that give you guys a little demo of that considering the fact that most of the side panel is a window that's what I'd consider to be acceptable and also has some weight to it which isn't always the case these days so inside this is where things start to get really interesting so I showed you how that radiator support worked up there you can do see the way that the five and a quarter inch pay is cut out here and the way that it's screwed in you can do the dual 140 s without actually removing the five and a quarter inch bays but if you want to you know step up to the big leagues and you want to move up to a three hundred and sixty millimeter radiator you will have to pull out your five and a quarter inch base but the good news is that you can you can also take out your three and a half inch base so you can see right here that those front 120 millimeter fans have easy access to be screwed into radiators so I can show you guys how the three and a half inch bays are removed so you can mount as I said before up to six three and a half inch drives and those will go on these sleds right here which have the usual fractal design vibration reducing rubber grommets go ahead and pop that out in fact you can actually mount these different ways as well so if you want to get a little bit more airflow to your graphics card from that front fan obviously more of air is going to be able to make it through this guy this way especially if you don't have hard drives in there versus this way or you can pull the whole thing out entirely and then just have free-flowing air going straight to your graphics card if you only need a few fans if you do want to pull that one out you actually just flip it over on the bottom I love construction of cases that is done with screws versus rivets because it gives you the flexibility to do what you want to do with it it is more expensive to implement this like let's be let's be real clear every cent counts when it comes to case manufacturing but I like it when case manufacturers spend that extra little bit to give us threaded holes and screws rather than rivets so there you go that's what it looks like oh okay we got to pull out another couple screws on the back because I guess they're fractal they wanted it to be you know Swedish Lee design so you can see this one has quite a bit less flex in the window one Swedish designed and you know very solid and all that stuff I remember their old cases never used to have quite that much care given to the solidity particularly in shipping I remember the define r2 had a couple of issues with that hard drive cage it wasn't reinforced enough and I didn't realize that when I did my original video wasn't until I ordered a container of them at NCIX and some of them started getting damaged particularly when we shipped them with a bunch of hard drives in them in pre-built system so there you go guys take things very seriously when I talk about the packaging of products because I actually do know all right so there you go there's that there's that cage oh so that gives us some idea of just how open the inside can be so you pull this bad boy out you put a thick red here thick double red here thick triple red up here you can put another single 120 down here you throw a single 120 in the back they've actually got adequate spacing here for radiators that are slightly wider than a fan and you have a very capable water cooling extravaganza of a case on a fairly reasonable budget so I'm impressed with this now in terms of the standard case features its M ATX as I mentioned before there's your four expansion slots that use the standard screws thumb screws for those it's got all black internal cables which is nice to see and you can also see here there sorry I want to give you a better view that you can see here that they come pre-wired through the included cable management grommets that Corsair made so popular with the release of the 800 D and then on the back we find two more SSD mounts on the way they've implemented this is much better than the way they used to do SSD mounts on the backup motherboard trays so they are actually removable using two screws here here and here well here here here and here and then you just mount the SSDs using the mounting holes here and pull them off and mount them as you see fit the way it used to be was they were holes that pass through the motherboard tray you actually had to remove your motherboard in order to mount s his T's on there cases so that was a little bit ridiculous there's ample cable management room in the back of the case so there's enough for a 24-pin connector but not a whole lot more I wouldn't expect to be passing anything over it and you've got a CPU cutout tray or cutout in the motherboard tray just the way that you'd expect on any modern case thank you for checking out my unboxing and an overview of the fractal design arc mini r2 which is not the arc media are - don't forget to subscribe to Linus Texas for more boxing's reviews and other computer videos like the video if you liked it dislike it if just like didn't leave a comment if you think that josh is just one hell of a stud