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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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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