Outside

The most obvious feature of the Arc XL is its gigantic size. It’s actually fairly rare that we see many cases this large anymore. Over the past the need for large cases has shrunk with Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX builds becoming more and more popular and with hard drive capacities getting larger as well. As with all of Fractals designs, I love how clean the Arc XL is. Why change what isn’t broke right? The Arc XL has its all blacked out finish, rounded edges on the front that remind me of the old Cooler Master ATCS 840 (without the aluminum of course), and the lack of plastic in their designs. The Arc XL is all steel and let me tell you, they used a heavy gauge steel because it is extremely heavy.

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Starting on the front of the Arc XL, we can see the curved edges on the sides better in the photo below. Being an XL case you get four 5.25 inch drive bay, each cover is flush mounted without any visible clips that will take away from the clean design. The bottom half of the front of the case has a large flush mounted mesh panel. When you push on the top of the panel two snap clips will push the mesh panel out to allow you to clean the intake filter inside. Without the panel we can see the 140mm fan that is comes with the case. There is room for a second should you need extra ventilation.

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Although there is very little plastic used on the Arc XL, the top mounted I/O panel is one of the few exceptions due to its rounded shape and in order for it to fit everything in the I/O. Over on the right you get four USB ports, two of those being blue USB 3.0 ports. Next to the USB ports is a small reset button then the power button. Inside of the power button is the power LED that lights up blue, when you have hard drive activity the LED will also light up red. Next you have microphone and headphone ports as usual. The switch all the way on the left is something different though. This is a three position fan speed controller. You can set your fan voltage to 5,7, or 12 volts to keep things quiet or speed them up when you need additional cooling.

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The rest of the top of the Arc XL is a very large mesh panel. Unlike most cases this doesn’t just take up part of the top, it covers nearly everything. This is a little different than what we would normally see from Fractal because ventilation like this can let noise out of the PC. But it should make for great airflow and multiple cooling options.

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The left side panel of the Arc XL has a very large tinted window in it although in my photo it doesn’t look as large in relation to the size of the side panel itself. This is the ideal window size that still allows you to hide the power supply wiring. The tinting of the side panel is a nice touch that continues to blacked out look while still giving you a peek inside, especially when you run interior lighting.

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The right side panel on the other hand has nothing going on.

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With the Arc XL coming in at an impressive 22.5 inches tall, Fractal filled took advantage of that space on the back of the case. The power supply mount is down at the bottom. Above that you get 9 PCI slots with each cover power coated in a contrasting bright white. To the right of the PCI slots there is a little more venting to help vent out the warm air from multiple GPU configurations. Moving higher up the back the rear I/O panel has a 140mm exhaust fan to pull the heat away from the motherboard and CPU. That still left them with a little room so there is another inch of venting up at the top of the case. We can see that the top panel is removable with two screws here on the back. That should give access to mounting various fans on the top of the Arc XL’s interior.

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The bottom of the Arc XL has a long removable filter that covers both the intake fan of your power supply and if you would like an intake fan on the bottom of the case. For feet Fractal went with spun aluminum feet with rubber pads on them. This gives a touch of class while keeping the case from moving around, not that the cases weight didn’t do a good job of that as well.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #34661 23 Apr 2014 11:33
Today I take a look at a case from Fractal's Arc series of cases. Specifically the XL model. It's a huge case but does still have most of the features that people love from Fractal cases.

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