Installation and Performance
One thing is for sure, there was no way I would run into fitment issues when installing in the Arc XL. I’ve mentioned it a fews times already but this is an extremely large case with the capacity to hold a large quad GPU build with 10 hard drives and four disc drives. So installing our Micro-ATX test rig into the Arc XL was like working in an old car with a small engine, there was plenty of room to move around. Installing the motherboard was as simple as putting in the rear I/O panel, making sure I had all of the correct standoffs, and then install the 9 screws. With the motherboard I was able to move on to installing our hard drive. To do that I had to install the four screws through the underside of one of the slide out hard drive trays. Even the large GTX 780 didn’t come close to being a tight fit when I installed it.
Next I moved on to wiring everything up. With so much room I was able to get the power supply installed without any issues. Coming from some of the Mini-ITX cases I have been working in recently this was a major change. Routing the cables out the grommeted hole by the PSU was no trouble but I did find that you have to be careful on how you route your cables behind the motherboard tray, there is enough room to get things done, but cables running overtop of your 24 pin will cause issues putting the side panel back on. I went ahead and hooked the fans through the built in fan speed controller.
We can see that with everything installed there was still about an inch of clearance above our Noctua heatsink. This should be enough room to run a few of the even larger heatsinks with 140mm fans.
There was just no way that I would run into heat issues with the three cooling fans and the overall size of the Arc XL. I do think if you plan on running a monster rig in the case you will have to take advantage of all of the extra fan mounting locations that Fractal gave you and add a few fans. Even with all of the extra ventilation the noise levels with the Arc XL weren’t too bad, dropping the fan speeds down to 7 volts quieted them up leaving the GTX 780 to be the only thing that was really capable of making much noise.
The biggest issue I ran into when testing out the Arc XL was its weight. Even before installing anything inside of it the case was more than I would ever want to carry into a LAN, adding a PC and potentially water cooling into the case make for a case that is going to be hard to move around without wheels.
