I feel very lucky today, not only do I get the chance to play around with a Fractal Design chassis, but one of their flagship designs at that. Here, I have the Define XL R2 Black Pearl, a chassis that may just look like any other from the pictures, but when standing alongside one, it’s fairly clear that this is something a little special.
With standing dimensions of 322 x 637 x 655, the R2 XL lives up to its “extra-large” implying title, it tall, wide, very long and imposing. Put simply, its big. However, with great dimensions comes a great weight too, and with a bulk of 16.5KG before you’ve installed so much as a SATA cable its likely you need take extra care when lifting the chassis.
Fractal Design have already built them selves a rock solid reputation for outstanding design, build quality, performance and they’ve even won several awards from eTeknix over the last couple of years, so I am keen to see just what the XL R2 has to offer beyond it being heavy.
As you can see from the specifications below there is a good reason for the chassis size, with support for tiny M-ATX and M-ITX motherboards, all the way up to and including XL-ATX, 9 expansion slots, deep PSUs and more.
Specifications
Cooling system
The XL R2 came bundled with the usual user’s manual as well as a neat little box with all the regular screws, bolts, cable ties, etc, required to install your components.
The chassis comes packaged in a fairly straight forward box that doesn’t give much away about the chassis other than a basic representation of its design.
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