Review: A well-designed, minimal case from Fractal Design, the Arc offers great cooling without being over-designed.
There are two companies at the moment who are really giving the more defined and well-known case makers like Antec a serious run for their money. One’s BitFenix, who we’ve recently started seriously falling for, but another new love of ours is anything with the Fractal Design moniker. In fact, between the two of them, they’ve recently released nearly a half dozen new cases onto the market, ranging from expensive and super-silent beasts to some of best budget gear we’ve seen.
The Arc midi tower isn’t quite in either camp. It’s pretty much lower mid-range, a little more upgunned than your average budget case, but not nearly as fancy as mid-range gaming box. The admittedly minimal design’s quite an interesting move; the Arc is almost Fractal Design’s answer to the high airflow cases of Coolermaster, but without the aggressive styling.
In fact, it’s positively laid back and almost old-school in its simplicity. Fractal’s made pretty much the entire front and top surfaces into mesh fan mounts, backed up by filter material to dust and small dead animals out of your precious PC innards. The side panels are similarly plain, except for a fan mount on the left-hand panel, and the rear is broken up only by the contrasting white expansion brackets. In fact, if you ignored the Fractal Design logo etched into the somewhat cheap plastic finish of the front fascia, you could almost mistake this for a Lian Li design!
Those two mesh panels conceal a single 140mm fan each, and there’s a third one on the rear panel. However, there’s room for five more fans to be added to the case, and the case even comes with a slot for an included fan controller mount alongside the expansion slots at the case’s rear. With mesh inserts also on the case’s bottom panel, the Arc’s got a lot going for it for anyone looking for a clean, yet breezy case.
The interior is well designed and pretty clean, as you’d expect of any case with seriously cool ambitions. The HDD bays mount pointing out of the side of the case, and while they’re all secured by a single thumb-screw, are inherently tool-less with a pinch-grip mechanism. They also feature rubber-grommeted mounts that can fit both a standard HDD or an SSD in every one of the eight bays. Even neater, the lower bay can be removed to fit in video cards longer than 290mm, or to improve airflow even further.
There’s also a lot of clearance behind the mobo plate, which along with rubber coated cable runs, makes this a great choice for a neat cable job; this too helps airflow, so the Arc has been very well thought out.
About the only bad thing we can say about this case is that it’s on the heavy side, thanks to a lot of solid steel construction. Other than that, though, if you want a minimally designed case with excellent cooling, the Arc’s on the ball.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012