Fractal Design Define R2 XL Chassis Review

Total build time for the Fractal Design XL R2 was a little over 30 minutes, which is a little longer than most cases, but then again this is a lot larger than most chassis I work with. I had no problem installing any of our test components, in fact our test components look quite silly and small in such as gargantuan chassis. As you can see, the cable management is doing a stellar job of keeping things neat and tidy and the extra space around our motherboard is extensive.

Most notably the space around the top of the chassis, where even our Antec Kuhler’s radiator has a huge amount of clearance from the top of the chassis. You shouldn’t have any problems fitting a large radiator in the top of the XL R2.

There is a good amount of clearance from both the CPU cooler block and the fan/radiators in the back of the chassis and more than enough for a quad GPU system, which still leaving plenty of room for everything to breath.

With the top hard drive bay removed we get a better view of the 140mm front intake fan (the one mounted on the flip out front panel), even with this bay removed we still have four HDD bays left and that’s more than enough given that I’m only installing a single 520GB SSD.