It’s a little crazy to think that just a few years ago Fractal stormed the market with their Scandinavian designs. Now Fractal is a common name in the enthusiast scene. They were able to do this because they never compromise on their design philosophies and their high build quality. As it turns out, people want a good product at a reasonable price, who knew right? Well today, I have the chance to take a look at a case from their Arc series of cases that are designed for increased cooling while still giving you the “fractal” styling that we know and love. Specifically today, I will check out their Arc XL, their largest model. I’m excited to see what sets the Arc XL apart from the competition and from Fractals other product lines.

Product Name: Fractal Arc XL

Review Sample Provided by: Fractal

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

Fractal has always kept their packaging simple and the packaging for the Arc XL is no different. As expected, the box was very large due to the Arc XL’s XL size. However, on the outside you have a brown box with a line drawing of the case in black across the front. Beyond that you have the model name up in the top left corner and the Fractal Design logo up in the top right. They did however include a full specification listing over on the side of the box. When buying online it isn’t a big deal but if you are picking up a case at your local computer shop you want to make sure that the case supports your motherboard size, PSU length, and video card length. Fractal included all of that information and anything else you might want to know.

Inside the Arc XL comes wrapped up in a plastic bag and protected with Styrofoam on each side to keep it from moving around and getting banged up during shipping.

For documentation, you get a bright red notice that asked that you return the case to Fractal rather than retailers if there is an issue. You also get a user’s manual just in case you have any questions when building your PC.

Down inside of the case itself you also get a small box with all of the screws needed to build your PC as well as motherboard standoff and zip ties. Each screw type is in its own resealable bag to make finding a screw later on much easier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Inside

Fractal continued with their black with white trim styling on the interior of the Arc XL. When backed away we can see just how large this case is inside.

Starting up in the top right corner the Arc XL has its 5.25-inch drive cage with four slots. This is bigger than we normally see on most other large cases. Fractal skipped including any tooless hardware here and went old school on all four bays. Four bays is enough room to pack in two double bay reservoirs or a double plus two disc drives.

Down in the bottom right corner the Arc XL hard two four bay hard drive cages. Each cage is removable with thumbscrews and they each have four white hard drive trays. Fractals hard drive trays are all metal while most other manufactures use plastic to save money and for tooless functionality. Here you can install 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drives, but you have to install them with rubber grommets and screws. The trays pull out by pinching the tabs and pulling out.

Down in the bottom left we have the power supply mount. Being such a large case you have enough room to fit any ATX power supply on the market, including the high wattage long power supplies. Around the edge of the back panel Fractal did include a foam padding to prevent any vibration from passing through. There are also tall rubber mounts on the bottom of the case that hold the power supply up and dampen vibration as well. The bottom does have a filtered intake for the PSU and there is a fan mount on the bottom should you need even more ventilation. In this picture we can see some of the grommeted holes for routing the power cables, the largest being right in front of the PSU to make it easy to route them up behind the motherboard tray.

For PCI slots we have nine bright white vented slots that will support your quad SLI/Crossfire. I love the small wire pass-through right at the bottom left of your motherboard. Most boards don’t have this, but I welcome it as a way to keep front panel audio connection wiring clean.

The top of the motherboard has two of the same cable pass-throughs for hooking up top fan headers as well as your 4/8 pin CPU power header. For cooling Fractal included two 140mm exhaust fans, one facing the rear and the other facing up. Both fans have the same black and white theme as the intake fan we saw on the front of the case. Also in this photo is the CPU access panel, Fractal went big with it as well. You shouldn’t have issues installing a backplate in nearly any motherboard configuration.

When we pull the top panel off the Arc XL we can see the cleanable filter on the underside of it. Fractal is using the top as an exhaust but having a filter up top keeps dust from falling in as well. Under that filter we have a whole variety of fan mounting options on the top panel. We can go with a triple 120 radiator or a double 140mm. There are also mounting holes for a 200mm if that is what you prefer.

With the back panel off we can see that Fractal has given us ¾ of an inch of wiring space behind the motherboard tray and even more space behind the hard drive trays.

If the eight hard drive trays the Arc Xl comes with wasn’t enough. Fractal slipped in two SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray. Not too long ago you would catch me double sided sticky tapping a hard drive or SSD to the back of the motherboard try to give me more room for water-cooling, now we are moving up in the world.

Tucked up in the left corner we also have the three fan headers that tie into the front panel fan controller. All you have to do is hook up the Molex and you can power the three fans included with the Arc XL. 

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.

Overall and Final Verdict

The Fractal Arc XL is an interesting case, I love the Fractal styling and its overall build quality. The problem is combining that build quality with a case of this size leads to a case that is extremely heavy. Unless you have a specific need for a case of this size I wouldn’t really recommend it. But if you do need to build a quad GPU PC with 8 hard drives, 2 SSDs, four disc drives, and a little water cooling you shouldn’t have any trouble fitting it in the Arc XL.

Beyond the size, it was interesting to see Fractal build a case that has more of a focus on air flow than silence. Most of the cases I have reviews from them in the past have traded off fans for less noise. The Arc XL isn’t silent like some of the other Fractal case, but the small amount of noise is a great tradeoff for the amount of cooling potential they allowed. Fractal also built in a fan speed controller into the front I/O although it would be nice if it would control a few more fans. All in all the Arc XL is a great case that continues the reputation that Fractal has quickly built up. The market for a case of this size might be a little small, but it’s great to know they are giving options.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.