**A Comprehensive Review of the Fractal Design Meshify C**

The Fractal Design Meshify C is one of the cases that falls under the category of being expensive, with a price tag of $190. While this may seem steep to some, it's essential to consider that there are many other high-end cases available in the market that can be compared to this one. In our recent review of the Fractal Design 500 Odyssey case, we expressed disappointment with its design choices and ultimately concluded that it wasn't worth the investment.

However, the Meshify C is a different story altogether. It's clear that Fractal Design has put a lot of thought into designing this case, and it shows in the attention to detail and features that it offers. One of the standout features of this case is its airflow, which is exceptional. The designers have made sure that there are plenty of gaps and openings throughout the case that allow for excellent air circulation, making it an ideal choice for those who want to keep their system cool.

Another feature that sets the Meshify C apart from other cases is its drive cages. While we would have liked to see more options in this department, the fact that Fractal Design has included three drive cages is a welcome addition. This will allow users to easily install and manage their drives, making it an excellent choice for those who want a high-performance system.

One of the things that impressed us most about the Meshify C is its ability to accommodate large fans. With the inclusion of 140mm fans in the case, users can take advantage of the excellent airflow and keep their system running smoothly. We were also pleased to see that Fractal Design has made sure that there are enough openings for radiators, making it easy to install a high-performance cooling solution.

We have to say that our opinion on cases with add-ons has changed over time. While we still believe that they can be useful, we understand why some users might not appreciate them. In this case, the fact that Fractal Design has included fans as part of the package is a major plus. We were impressed by the quality of these fans and the way they perform.

**Inheriting from the RVO2**

The Meshify C can be seen as a natural successor to the SilverStone RVO2 case. While it doesn't offer all the same features, it does share many similarities with its predecessor. The design is unique and offers an inverted airflow pattern that's reminiscent of the RVO2. This means that users who have fallen in love with the RVO2 will find a lot to like about this new case.

**Value for Money**

One of the most significant factors we considered when evaluating the Meshify C was its value for money. With a price tag of $190, it's clear that this is an investment that requires careful consideration. If you're planning to strip the fans from the case and replace them with your own, you'll be losing out on the majority of the value. In this scenario, it might make more sense to consider alternative cases like the Fractal Design Meshify C XL or the Phantek Eclipse P400D.

However, if you're looking for a high-end case that offers excellent airflow and features, the Meshify C is an excellent choice. With its inclusion of fans, drive cages, and radiators, this case offers everything you need to build a high-performance system. We were particularly impressed by the quality of the 140mm fans and the way they performed in our tests.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, we're extremely pleased with the Fractal Design Meshify C. It's clear that Fractal Design has put a lot of thought into designing this case, and it shows in the attention to detail and features that it offers. With its excellent airflow, drive cages, and radiators, this case is an excellent choice for those who want to build a high-performance system.

While we did have some reservations about the add-on feature set, these are largely outweighed by the benefits of owning this case. If you're in the market for a high-end case that offers exceptional performance and features, the Meshify C is an excellent choice. With its unique design and attention to detail, it's clear that Fractal Design has outdone themselves with this latest release.

**Recommendation**

If you're looking for alternative options at a lower price point, we recommend checking out the Corsair 4000 D Airflow or the Phantek P500A. These cases offer similar features and performance to the Meshify C but at a lower price tag. The Corsair 4000 D Airflow is an excellent choice if you're looking for a case that offers exceptional airflow and features, while the Phantek P500A is a great option if you want a case with a more compact footprint.

Ultimately, our recommendation is to consider the Meshify C if you have the budget for it. With its exceptional performance, features, and design, it's clear that this case is a top-notch choice for anyone looking to build a high-performance system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhere's a crazy start to a case review we like this case this is the fractal torrent it's actually been really nice to work with which is a great change of pace unfortunately there's a depressing side effect to products being good especially cases and that is that a lot of people seem to not care when they're good but hopefully people pass this video around anyway because the fractal torrent actually deserves some recognition here it's if you liked the silverstone rvo2 if you remember that case this is in some ways a follow-up to it in that it revives 180 ml fans so really interesting it comes with some insanely thick uh 34 36 mil fans and they're 180 in the front they've got 140s on the bottom there's a lot of them and it is highly airflow focused while still having really good build quality so we're going to talk about this case today before that this video is brought to you by asus and the asus tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard ready for amd ryzen cpus the tough gaming b550 board comes in atx and micro atx variants with key features including a wi-fi 6 module 2.5 gigabit ethernet a fanless chipset heatsink for quiet operation and a focus on stability and uptime learn more about the tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard at the link in the description below fractal for the longest time had way too much pride about never deviating from what it did which was a very plain minimalistic in the most buzzwordy sense of the word black rectangle that had a solid front and maybe some kind of claim to noise damping or something like that they slowly deviated from it and as they deviated from it fractal moved towards the meshify series the mesh5c for example later this devolved into a whole new mesh phi2 series of cases that overall we've been fairly positive about don't get fractal wrong they're still all black rectangles but they did start experimenting with other things this is the torrent and the torrent despite its name doesn't have too many hard drive cages it does however have a lot of airflow and fans the front of it also shows that fractal is still able to come up with new and interesting designs visually that is other than what the meshify series did which was simple geometry that then everybody in the industry decided to copy because apparently triangles are hard to figure out on your own and so when fractal did it everyone decided that was the new thing the case comes with two giant dynamic x2 gp18 fans it has a set of three dynamic x2 pwm fans on the bottom that are mil and it's got space to shuffle them around a little bit although we'll talk about that more later mechanically things are pretty simple but well designed and mostly intuitive the panels pop out there is a piece of plastic that protrudes at the end of it back here you push on it panel comes out pretty straight forward otherwise it snaps in with your standard set of snaps there's an optional screw to hold panels in place the top panel has two screws at the back which are in some ways reminiscent of the h500 series that we criticized originally for falling apart because it didn't have any screws to hold the panel on cooler master uh h500p okay but they later added them cooler master that is and fraxel's done something similar here now a couple things we need to talk about the top panel is solid this is not an accident this isn't an oversight by fractal definitely some people are going to point out the fact that the top panel is solid and ask about airflow as a reminder airflow is not as simple as just have holes everywhere in the case that's kind of an easy way to try and do it but it's a scatter shot approach that doesn't always work well the reason it doesn't always work well is because air will escape wherever it can so if it's a positive pressure setup which this is there's two massive intake fans then there's three intake fans relatively large at the bottom if it's a positive airflow setup what's going to happen with those front fans especially is the air will come in through the top right here and immediately exit and the reason it'll do that is because it's positive pressure air is going to move to wherever there's the least resistance or the most pull in this case there's a little bit of pull from the cpu cooler you'll get some of it there but not all of it and since the fan is seated up above a tower cooler that's why you're going to have the exiting air path if there's holes in the top so this actually makes sense the pricing is mostly 198 for everything including the steel panel version if you don't want the glass typically those are a bit cheaper this time they're not there's an rgb variant as well and that one does cost more that one's 230 the rgb variant we don't have that one there are in the non-rgb ones some rgb leds installed anyway but they're not there's none in the fans in the non-rgb model and the strip that's installed up here in the power splash route you will have to connect to your own rgb controller or header so it's fairly expensive but the 180 to 200 case class has gotten popular in the last two years the lienly 011xl certainly a good competitor the corsair 7000d is another one the fractal meshfy 2xl was one as well competing with themselves here uh and fantax has the m32 pro and a little bit cheaper it's got the fantax 500. so it's a competitive price class there's something to be said for those expensive cases because a lot of them are good enough that you can carry it forward to another build but obviously they're out of the price range for a lot of builds out there that said sometimes it's actually justifiable for many other reasons so let's get started on the build notes talk about it we'll go through the thermals which are actually very good on this and then talk conclusions let's start with the exterior of the case and the construction the torrance is constructed of steel trimmed with matte plastic color matching between the plastic elements was good overall in our black sample but we can't vouch for the white or the gray models without having seen them panel fitment is pretty good the joint however between the top plastic cover and the front i o unit strikes us as a potential problem area the tolerances here are extremely tight and any variant in manufacturing will be made obvious as one final nitpick or item to be aware of before we progress to the cool part of the case the fans the matte surfaces tend to really highlight oily marks and fingerprints so be careful with your trademarked triangular dusty chips in red or blue bags or just touching the panels in general we probably will be using gloves to work with this while we're filming to avoid the marks these days the most common fan sizes as you all likely know are 120 and 140 millimeters cases that support fans at larger than 140 almost exclusively jumped to 200. there was a period where sometimes you would see 220s and 180s both of these are extremely uncommon and 220s and 230s have basically died 200 millimeters are somewhat common at this point thanks largely to cooler master but the mounting hole spacing is not it is non-standard which is annoying 180 millimeters is far rarer it's dominated by silverstone's overkill air penetrator ap181 and 182 almost entirely we appreciate fraxel's attention to detail with features like small clips that hold the fan wires into the frame this is a really small detail that we haven't really seen before at least not commonly the fact that all the fan cables are also unusually long like half a meter for the 140mm fans and a full meter for the gp18s measured from the center of the fan is also beneficial the argb skus include the same number of fans with the same specs but just argb we don't have those to look at today the 180 ml mounting holes are standard or at least compared to the older silverstone ones so these could be used to replace fractal stock fans if you wanted to keep the old ap series in use both the front and the bottom mount support 180 140 and 120mm fans this means that the stock front fans and the bottom fans could be swapped with each other but don't do it the thermals won't improve and we'll cover that more later in this review but more importantly the thick gp18s wedge in the flush with the edge of the motherboard and block multiple cable cutouts a stack of 140ml fans in the front additionally would get in the way of sliding the fan tray into the bottom of the case fraxel's 180 mil fans are unusually thick they claim 38 mil we measured about 36 millimeters and typical fans are 25 millimeters thick and even silverstone's air penetrators are only 32 millimeters thick almost any fan would be easier to install on the bottom of the torrent than the gp18s but they do technically fit one recurring issue with bottom intake fans is that loose cables can dangle into the blades silverstone in the past with raven02 solved this with their 180 ml fans by integrating protective grilles into the fans themselves but there's nothing like that in the torrent so you'll just need to route the cables carefully additionally note that there's not enough space to sandwich a 180 mil wide fan and a radiator on the bottom mount 180 millimeter radiators can only be installed in the front mount and fractal acknowledges this in the specs for the case fractal however also claims that the front and the bottom mount support up to 420 millimeter radiators they do not however support two of them simultaneously and fitting any radiator larger than 360 millimeters into either mount would be a challenge so don't count on it it does depend on what you're using though the bottom mount has about 45 centimeters to work with and the front has just barely more than 42 centimeters for clearance installing any radiator at all in the bottom mount may conflict with cables plugged into the bottom edge of the motherboard or the expansion slots at the rear of the case as usual we greatly appreciate the removable fan tray at the bottom of the case although the metal hooks can be tricky to get lined up just right this should go without saying by now but we don't recommend installing closely liquid coolers with the radiators at the bottom of the case if a radiator is installed below the pump level it should be in an open loop with a discrete reservoir above the pump somewhere the bottom intake fans have approximately five centimeters of clearance from the table surface and we'll talk about if that's enough clearance for this uh air pathway once we get into the thermals let's get into the mechanics of the case a little bit the front fan mounts and the torrent are well thought out out of the box the 180 millimeter fans are attached directly to the chassis and surrounded by removable metal inserts which function as a removable fan and radiator tray to install smaller 140 or 120 ml fans two metal rails can be attached to the front of the case the clever part is that these rails don't have two sets of holes they have one set and the rails themselves can be spaced closer together or farther apart to fit different fan sizes this means that 140 millimeter fans aren't obstructed by 120 millimeter mounting rails our one complaint about this system is that the rails overhang the fan tray at the bottom of the case so they have to be removed before messing with the bottom fan mount like many other fractal cases the torrent is large enough to have a considerable amount of space between the leading edge of an atx board and the front fence about 17.5 centimeters with the stock layout unlike many other fractal cases this space is not usable for drive base but there are several other ways that it can be filled first the case officially supports ssi eeb motherboards with a full set of standoffs second there's a row of mounting holes for reservoirs and these are directly below a set of well-placed fill ports hidden by the top cover of the case this is actually extremely convenient if you're planning to do water cooling third there's enough space for extremely thick double c radiators like alpha's monsta radiators you could also have a normal radiator with fractals chunky 180 ml gp18 intake vent sadly you cannot have both the thick double c fan and the thick double c monster radiator at the same time because the world wasn't ready for it that would be limited by the six centimeters or so of clearance against the motherboard tray sorry to the one person who's ever bought a dual 180ml monster rad uh the narrower 140 or 120 mil ones would be easier to work with because they don't interfere with the tray and they could be thicker as a result since the front and the bottom of this case are entirely covered with fan mounts all of the torrance drive mounts are behind the motherboard tray a maximum of two three and a half inch drives and four two and a half inch drives are supported the three and a half inch sleds don't have two and a half inch mounting holes it would be cool to have the option to stick a couple of two and a half inch drives in the small unused space underneath the top cover or to have the option of bolting a hard drive cage in at the front under the power supply shroud there is space there where you can maybe hang hard drives down vertically or fit them across horizontally and it's maybe something that fractal could have sold as an add-on or included in the case either way if only because it has a name like torrent we think it should probably have a little bit more drive space offered but maybe not required so a detachable cage would work great this power supply has to pull air from inside the torrent this is pretty harmless keeping power supplies cool is ideal obviously but they certainly aren't the most heat sensitive part of a pc and it does have a large fan in it in most cases you might want to be careful of sticking a fully passive power supply in here but otherwise the torrent has so much active airflow the power supply won't have a chance to roast itself one exception top mounting the power supply has allowed fractal to place fan mounts along the entire bottom surface of the case reminding us of the silverstone rv02 or the cooler master sl600m both cases have performed pretty well in thermal testing with some caveats it also means that the power supply is immediately accessible by removing the top cover of the case so modular cables can be easily connected or disconnected and burned out husks of gigabyte gpp 750 gm power supplies can be removed if they haven't arc welded themselves to the chassis cable management initially appears easy fractal has provided removable plastic cable tracks that snap into tie points on the rear of the motherboard tray wrapped with velcro straps these straps make it easy to tie down the cables and logical paths mainly along the edge of the motherboard and diagonally out of the power slide chamber cutouts are generously large and there's a spare cutout at the upper corner of the motherboard tray to make up for some of the cutouts that would be blocked by a full ssi eeb board this is great attention to detail however because of the case layout there's absolutely zero space for cable slack at the bottom of the case when installing a system in the torrent the best space for loose cables is in the power supply chamber at the top of the case which is just wasted space otherwise the gap between the motherboard tray and the side panel is about 2.7 centimeters so the bottom edge of the case where fan drive and power cables converge will become a bit cramped we found that fractal's tie points allowed us to manage cables cleanly but it isn't the case that forgives laziness in this area one final neat attention to detail here fractal included miniature velcro loops along the back of the case designed to hold power cables from top mounted power supplies as well as any display and peripheral cables that need management this might imply that there's something especially messy about top mounting to power supply but it's not really true the velcro loops are just a cool feature we like it time to get into the thermals we performed our normal suite of thermal tests on the torrents but we also ran a pass with two 180 ml front intake fans and three 140ml bottom intake fans swapped as we mentioned in the build section this is an officially supported configuration but it's much harder to work with than the stock layout as for the competition there aren't many contemporary cases appropriate to directly compare to the torrent the corsair 7000d airflow maybe makes sense fantax p500a digital makes sense and fraxel's own mesh by 2xl these are all large cases they're all well ventilated and they're all branded as somewhat of a premium but none of those are as concerned with including a full set of high performance fans the fantax m2 pro 2 and the lanley 011xl are the right size and price but they don't include any fans at all cooler masters sl 600m or their h-series cases with the 200 ml intake fans included might be the closest in spirit and we look forward to seeing how the half 500 turns out but the rest of these cases are a few years old now starting first with just the torrent and the rvo2 because they're related the cpu averaged 40 degrees celsius above ambient in the initial stock torture test and swapping the fans had no effect on this but removing the front panel did without that nylon mesh the cpu averaged 38 degrees this is a much smaller delta than we typically see from removing a front panel and that's because the low restrictiveness of the front filter and the overkill intake fans mean that the cpu temperature is already about as good as it can possibly be with the tower cooler that we're using in this test bench comparatively 40 degrees over ambience is the best average cpu temperature we've recorded yet using this equipment dating back years and including all-time greats like the old rvo2 at 43 degrees and open air cases like the cougar conquer which was 42 degrees the number and quality of stock fans included with the torrent is a rare sight the 7000d ends up about five to six degrees behind though clearly outfitting it with comparable fans would close in on the competition in the same test the gpu averaged 50 degrees above ambient removing the front panel brought gpu temperatures down slightly to 48 while swapping the 180 ml fans into bottom intake raised the temperature to 51 degrees fractal has already optimized its fan layout here the rvo2 is right alongside the torrent as well comparatively 50 degrees isn't an all-time record breaker the way that the cpu average was the p500a digital averaged 48 degrees for example as did the old rvo2 still the torrentism on the best averages we've recorded recently the fractal meshfy 2xl is all the way on the other end of the chart at 55 degrees average going overboard here in the torrent with stock fans obviously benefited it but the meshfy 2xl could be made better if you spent more money on its cooling of course gpu temperature in the firestrike test was slightly lower than baseline down to 47 degrees that small difference is almost enough to put the torrent at the top of this chart and the sl600m and the p500a are also up there mostly with an error of the torrent our blender test runs only one component at a time reducing thermal load in the cpu rendered pass the cpu averaged 32 degrees handily beating the previous best results by a meaningful amount for our test hardware this is the best case for cpu cooling that we've looked at yet fractal does especially well when less overall heat is generated within the system the gpu averaged 21 degrees when using it to render instead which is tied for the best results on the chart with the lancol 2 mesh and the p500a digital gpu temperatures were good in the original test but the fire strike and blender tests show that when loading the gpu in isolation the torrent excels our standardized fan test uses three noctua fans to compare cases on mostly level ground without the advantages or disadvantages conferred by their stock vent as always these results are imperfect by nature we installed the fans in the same layout as we always do if practical so there's two 140mm intakes and one 120mm rear exhaust but this is not something you should do if you buy the torrent it doesn't make any sense there are advantages and disadvantages to this testing we have a whole methodology piece explaining them and we're running it just because it's something that people often ask for overall the torrent performed impressively well in this test regardless average cpu temperature was just 44 degrees above ambience tied with the p 500a digital and the 7000d airflow and only slightly warmer than the chart topping landcall 215. however none of this really means anything because it's going to come with more fans that are better so again this is just something people ask for a lot but our methodology piece explains what those imperfections are just make sure you understand what they are before you go randomly paste charts on reddit the gpu average in the same test was 55 degrees the removal of the stock bottom intake fans hurt the torrent a lot here putting it on the warm end of the chart but the same is true of the 7000d in the land cool 215 to some extent again the torrent comes with three bottom intake fans so the fact that taking those fans out hurts the gpu thermals really shouldn't blow anyone's mind it makes sense for noise normalized testing we lower the speed of just the case fans to reach 36 dba noise threshold for the whole system that's at 20 inches in the torrent that required lowering the speed of the case fans to 47 to bring the case noise down from 50.8 dba at 100 speed the torrent is the loudest case on our chart when it's at max speed and those 180 ml fans running at 1200 rpm are the reason why on the other hand the size of the fans means that they're still able to move a lot of air at lower speeds average cpu temperature at the reduced noise threshold is 46 degrees above ambient keeping the torrent at the top of this chart as well by beating the lancol 215 even average gpu temperature was 53 degrees above ambient the p500a has an advantage here at 50 degrees average but the torrent holds its own for the most part against the rest of the chart this is a test where open fronted cases with big quiet fans will excel even more so than the torture tests so the case obviously still has some problems we listed a lot of them in the build section most of them are small and we're at a stage where it's it's largely attention to detail things there's already a lot of good attention to detail in this and overall this is a case that it's a lot of times when we kind of like a case but maybe we have some problems with it we'll say it's fine or we'll say uh we don't hate it or we'll say we don't mind recommending it which is one of the strongest recommendations we can give is when we say we don't mind recommending this it's very very rare however that patrick and i together actually both like a case this is one of them it's expensive at 190 dollars but there's a lot of 190 dollars a lot of 200 cases there's a 500 odyssey acts we reviewed recently that we didn't like uh so being expensive doesn't automatically win here in fact a lot of the times you lose if your case is too expensive in our reviews fractal here has done a good job with the torrent we would like to see an option for drive cages more of them somewhere one well the name of course but two it genuinely would do well with them airflow is great for drives uh there's space for it in the top you could hang them down from the front of it and do a vertical mount and slot them in like that you probably fit maybe two or three of them in there and it's also large enough where it does kind of make sense to bring back some hard drive support there's still an audience out there for it that maybe wants a nas in their own system or a raid or whatever it's getting less popular we can understand why frack will cut it but it's something that could have been accommodated and we would have liked to see that even if it's an add-on not big fans of that but our opinions have shifted a little bit over the years with add-ons as the amount of waste cases include has increased fractal does a great job of following up the silver stone rvo2 the rvo2 hasn't really been followed up even by silverstone silverstone has made other cases that are good but the rvo2 was sort of special it was different it did unique things 180 was interesting and it was inverted and bottom intake now this isn't inverted but it does a lot of the other things the rvo2 did so if you have been using an rvo2 or you've liked that case for a long time this is your successor this is the one you buy to replace an rvo2 or to buy it if you never were able to get it to begin with now obviously there's sort of one big point to this case which is it comes with a lot of fans and they're pretty good that means if you are planning to strip the fans out of the case you are losing the majority of the value so if you're planning to go water cooling and you have your own fans to use for that you're starting to waste money here maybe you should get if you want fractal the meshfy 2xl or the o11 dynamic or the fantex and through pro instead that would maybe make more sense in that scenario these fans though i mean 140 is a common radiator size times however many multiples up to three in this case you can keep the fans here and stack them on a radiator just watch out for those clearances we talked about them here there's even 180 ml radiators we haven't tried it however patrick and i both really want to do maybe a live stream build with this case because we'd like to use this case for one of our production systems that's about the highest praise we can give a case here the alphacool monsta radiator looks like it would be fun to mount it as an odd sized radiator on these 180s so overall we like it congratulations fractal you've won the game there's there's no more game after this you have reached end game uh it's not gonna get better so that's a big bar to to live up to on their next one but uh yeah we we can recommend this one if you're in the 200 price class for a case it's expensive if you want something cheaper check out the landley lancole 215. it's a great case for a much lower price you can check out the phantek p 400 or p 500 a if they're in stock and that they're closer to msrp prices that they shipped at and the 011 dynamic is still good if it's around the 130 mark you will have to provide your own fans though so that gives you a range of cases the corsair 4000 d airflow is another good one to look at that now your range is about 80 up to 150 before you get into this class plenty of good stuff out there but if you're spending this much we can say go for it that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like to support this type of in-depth testing where we really get involved in the hardware and figure out if it's good you can also go to patreon.comgamersnexus for behind the scenes videos we published one actually on this case with patrick on camera to share some of his thoughts directly with our patreon backers thanks for watching we'll see you all next timehere's a crazy start to a case review we like this case this is the fractal torrent it's actually been really nice to work with which is a great change of pace unfortunately there's a depressing side effect to products being good especially cases and that is that a lot of people seem to not care when they're good but hopefully people pass this video around anyway because the fractal torrent actually deserves some recognition here it's if you liked the silverstone rvo2 if you remember that case this is in some ways a follow-up to it in that it revives 180 ml fans so really interesting it comes with some insanely thick uh 34 36 mil fans and they're 180 in the front they've got 140s on the bottom there's a lot of them and it is highly airflow focused while still having really good build quality so we're going to talk about this case today before that this video is brought to you by asus and the asus tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard ready for amd ryzen cpus the tough gaming b550 board comes in atx and micro atx variants with key features including a wi-fi 6 module 2.5 gigabit ethernet a fanless chipset heatsink for quiet operation and a focus on stability and uptime learn more about the tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard at the link in the description below fractal for the longest time had way too much pride about never deviating from what it did which was a very plain minimalistic in the most buzzwordy sense of the word black rectangle that had a solid front and maybe some kind of claim to noise damping or something like that they slowly deviated from it and as they deviated from it fractal moved towards the meshify series the mesh5c for example later this devolved into a whole new mesh phi2 series of cases that overall we've been fairly positive about don't get fractal wrong they're still all black rectangles but they did start experimenting with other things this is the torrent and the torrent despite its name doesn't have too many hard drive cages it does however have a lot of airflow and fans the front of it also shows that fractal is still able to come up with new and interesting designs visually that is other than what the meshify series did which was simple geometry that then everybody in the industry decided to copy because apparently triangles are hard to figure out on your own and so when fractal did it everyone decided that was the new thing the case comes with two giant dynamic x2 gp18 fans it has a set of three dynamic x2 pwm fans on the bottom that are mil and it's got space to shuffle them around a little bit although we'll talk about that more later mechanically things are pretty simple but well designed and mostly intuitive the panels pop out there is a piece of plastic that protrudes at the end of it back here you push on it panel comes out pretty straight forward otherwise it snaps in with your standard set of snaps there's an optional screw to hold panels in place the top panel has two screws at the back which are in some ways reminiscent of the h500 series that we criticized originally for falling apart because it didn't have any screws to hold the panel on cooler master uh h500p okay but they later added them cooler master that is and fraxel's done something similar here now a couple things we need to talk about the top panel is solid this is not an accident this isn't an oversight by fractal definitely some people are going to point out the fact that the top panel is solid and ask about airflow as a reminder airflow is not as simple as just have holes everywhere in the case that's kind of an easy way to try and do it but it's a scatter shot approach that doesn't always work well the reason it doesn't always work well is because air will escape wherever it can so if it's a positive pressure setup which this is there's two massive intake fans then there's three intake fans relatively large at the bottom if it's a positive airflow setup what's going to happen with those front fans especially is the air will come in through the top right here and immediately exit and the reason it'll do that is because it's positive pressure air is going to move to wherever there's the least resistance or the most pull in this case there's a little bit of pull from the cpu cooler you'll get some of it there but not all of it and since the fan is seated up above a tower cooler that's why you're going to have the exiting air path if there's holes in the top so this actually makes sense the pricing is mostly 198 for everything including the steel panel version if you don't want the glass typically those are a bit cheaper this time they're not there's an rgb variant as well and that one does cost more that one's 230 the rgb variant we don't have that one there are in the non-rgb ones some rgb leds installed anyway but they're not there's none in the fans in the non-rgb model and the strip that's installed up here in the power splash route you will have to connect to your own rgb controller or header so it's fairly expensive but the 180 to 200 case class has gotten popular in the last two years the lienly 011xl certainly a good competitor the corsair 7000d is another one the fractal meshfy 2xl was one as well competing with themselves here uh and fantax has the m32 pro and a little bit cheaper it's got the fantax 500. so it's a competitive price class there's something to be said for those expensive cases because a lot of them are good enough that you can carry it forward to another build but obviously they're out of the price range for a lot of builds out there that said sometimes it's actually justifiable for many other reasons so let's get started on the build notes talk about it we'll go through the thermals which are actually very good on this and then talk conclusions let's start with the exterior of the case and the construction the torrance is constructed of steel trimmed with matte plastic color matching between the plastic elements was good overall in our black sample but we can't vouch for the white or the gray models without having seen them panel fitment is pretty good the joint however between the top plastic cover and the front i o unit strikes us as a potential problem area the tolerances here are extremely tight and any variant in manufacturing will be made obvious as one final nitpick or item to be aware of before we progress to the cool part of the case the fans the matte surfaces tend to really highlight oily marks and fingerprints so be careful with your trademarked triangular dusty chips in red or blue bags or just touching the panels in general we probably will be using gloves to work with this while we're filming to avoid the marks these days the most common fan sizes as you all likely know are 120 and 140 millimeters cases that support fans at larger than 140 almost exclusively jumped to 200. there was a period where sometimes you would see 220s and 180s both of these are extremely uncommon and 220s and 230s have basically died 200 millimeters are somewhat common at this point thanks largely to cooler master but the mounting hole spacing is not it is non-standard which is annoying 180 millimeters is far rarer it's dominated by silverstone's overkill air penetrator ap181 and 182 almost entirely we appreciate fraxel's attention to detail with features like small clips that hold the fan wires into the frame this is a really small detail that we haven't really seen before at least not commonly the fact that all the fan cables are also unusually long like half a meter for the 140mm fans and a full meter for the gp18s measured from the center of the fan is also beneficial the argb skus include the same number of fans with the same specs but just argb we don't have those to look at today the 180 ml mounting holes are standard or at least compared to the older silverstone ones so these could be used to replace fractal stock fans if you wanted to keep the old ap series in use both the front and the bottom mount support 180 140 and 120mm fans this means that the stock front fans and the bottom fans could be swapped with each other but don't do it the thermals won't improve and we'll cover that more later in this review but more importantly the thick gp18s wedge in the flush with the edge of the motherboard and block multiple cable cutouts a stack of 140ml fans in the front additionally would get in the way of sliding the fan tray into the bottom of the case fraxel's 180 mil fans are unusually thick they claim 38 mil we measured about 36 millimeters and typical fans are 25 millimeters thick and even silverstone's air penetrators are only 32 millimeters thick almost any fan would be easier to install on the bottom of the torrent than the gp18s but they do technically fit one recurring issue with bottom intake fans is that loose cables can dangle into the blades silverstone in the past with raven02 solved this with their 180 ml fans by integrating protective grilles into the fans themselves but there's nothing like that in the torrent so you'll just need to route the cables carefully additionally note that there's not enough space to sandwich a 180 mil wide fan and a radiator on the bottom mount 180 millimeter radiators can only be installed in the front mount and fractal acknowledges this in the specs for the case fractal however also claims that the front and the bottom mount support up to 420 millimeter radiators they do not however support two of them simultaneously and fitting any radiator larger than 360 millimeters into either mount would be a challenge so don't count on it it does depend on what you're using though the bottom mount has about 45 centimeters to work with and the front has just barely more than 42 centimeters for clearance installing any radiator at all in the bottom mount may conflict with cables plugged into the bottom edge of the motherboard or the expansion slots at the rear of the case as usual we greatly appreciate the removable fan tray at the bottom of the case although the metal hooks can be tricky to get lined up just right this should go without saying by now but we don't recommend installing closely liquid coolers with the radiators at the bottom of the case if a radiator is installed below the pump level it should be in an open loop with a discrete reservoir above the pump somewhere the bottom intake fans have approximately five centimeters of clearance from the table surface and we'll talk about if that's enough clearance for this uh air pathway once we get into the thermals let's get into the mechanics of the case a little bit the front fan mounts and the torrent are well thought out out of the box the 180 millimeter fans are attached directly to the chassis and surrounded by removable metal inserts which function as a removable fan and radiator tray to install smaller 140 or 120 ml fans two metal rails can be attached to the front of the case the clever part is that these rails don't have two sets of holes they have one set and the rails themselves can be spaced closer together or farther apart to fit different fan sizes this means that 140 millimeter fans aren't obstructed by 120 millimeter mounting rails our one complaint about this system is that the rails overhang the fan tray at the bottom of the case so they have to be removed before messing with the bottom fan mount like many other fractal cases the torrent is large enough to have a considerable amount of space between the leading edge of an atx board and the front fence about 17.5 centimeters with the stock layout unlike many other fractal cases this space is not usable for drive base but there are several other ways that it can be filled first the case officially supports ssi eeb motherboards with a full set of standoffs second there's a row of mounting holes for reservoirs and these are directly below a set of well-placed fill ports hidden by the top cover of the case this is actually extremely convenient if you're planning to do water cooling third there's enough space for extremely thick double c radiators like alpha's monsta radiators you could also have a normal radiator with fractals chunky 180 ml gp18 intake vent sadly you cannot have both the thick double c fan and the thick double c monster radiator at the same time because the world wasn't ready for it that would be limited by the six centimeters or so of clearance against the motherboard tray sorry to the one person who's ever bought a dual 180ml monster rad uh the narrower 140 or 120 mil ones would be easier to work with because they don't interfere with the tray and they could be thicker as a result since the front and the bottom of this case are entirely covered with fan mounts all of the torrance drive mounts are behind the motherboard tray a maximum of two three and a half inch drives and four two and a half inch drives are supported the three and a half inch sleds don't have two and a half inch mounting holes it would be cool to have the option to stick a couple of two and a half inch drives in the small unused space underneath the top cover or to have the option of bolting a hard drive cage in at the front under the power supply shroud there is space there where you can maybe hang hard drives down vertically or fit them across horizontally and it's maybe something that fractal could have sold as an add-on or included in the case either way if only because it has a name like torrent we think it should probably have a little bit more drive space offered but maybe not required so a detachable cage would work great this power supply has to pull air from inside the torrent this is pretty harmless keeping power supplies cool is ideal obviously but they certainly aren't the most heat sensitive part of a pc and it does have a large fan in it in most cases you might want to be careful of sticking a fully passive power supply in here but otherwise the torrent has so much active airflow the power supply won't have a chance to roast itself one exception top mounting the power supply has allowed fractal to place fan mounts along the entire bottom surface of the case reminding us of the silverstone rv02 or the cooler master sl600m both cases have performed pretty well in thermal testing with some caveats it also means that the power supply is immediately accessible by removing the top cover of the case so modular cables can be easily connected or disconnected and burned out husks of gigabyte gpp 750 gm power supplies can be removed if they haven't arc welded themselves to the chassis cable management initially appears easy fractal has provided removable plastic cable tracks that snap into tie points on the rear of the motherboard tray wrapped with velcro straps these straps make it easy to tie down the cables and logical paths mainly along the edge of the motherboard and diagonally out of the power slide chamber cutouts are generously large and there's a spare cutout at the upper corner of the motherboard tray to make up for some of the cutouts that would be blocked by a full ssi eeb board this is great attention to detail however because of the case layout there's absolutely zero space for cable slack at the bottom of the case when installing a system in the torrent the best space for loose cables is in the power supply chamber at the top of the case which is just wasted space otherwise the gap between the motherboard tray and the side panel is about 2.7 centimeters so the bottom edge of the case where fan drive and power cables converge will become a bit cramped we found that fractal's tie points allowed us to manage cables cleanly but it isn't the case that forgives laziness in this area one final neat attention to detail here fractal included miniature velcro loops along the back of the case designed to hold power cables from top mounted power supplies as well as any display and peripheral cables that need management this might imply that there's something especially messy about top mounting to power supply but it's not really true the velcro loops are just a cool feature we like it time to get into the thermals we performed our normal suite of thermal tests on the torrents but we also ran a pass with two 180 ml front intake fans and three 140ml bottom intake fans swapped as we mentioned in the build section this is an officially supported configuration but it's much harder to work with than the stock layout as for the competition there aren't many contemporary cases appropriate to directly compare to the torrent the corsair 7000d airflow maybe makes sense fantax p500a digital makes sense and fraxel's own mesh by 2xl these are all large cases they're all well ventilated and they're all branded as somewhat of a premium but none of those are as concerned with including a full set of high performance fans the fantax m2 pro 2 and the lanley 011xl are the right size and price but they don't include any fans at all cooler masters sl 600m or their h-series cases with the 200 ml intake fans included might be the closest in spirit and we look forward to seeing how the half 500 turns out but the rest of these cases are a few years old now starting first with just the torrent and the rvo2 because they're related the cpu averaged 40 degrees celsius above ambient in the initial stock torture test and swapping the fans had no effect on this but removing the front panel did without that nylon mesh the cpu averaged 38 degrees this is a much smaller delta than we typically see from removing a front panel and that's because the low restrictiveness of the front filter and the overkill intake fans mean that the cpu temperature is already about as good as it can possibly be with the tower cooler that we're using in this test bench comparatively 40 degrees over ambience is the best average cpu temperature we've recorded yet using this equipment dating back years and including all-time greats like the old rvo2 at 43 degrees and open air cases like the cougar conquer which was 42 degrees the number and quality of stock fans included with the torrent is a rare sight the 7000d ends up about five to six degrees behind though clearly outfitting it with comparable fans would close in on the competition in the same test the gpu averaged 50 degrees above ambient removing the front panel brought gpu temperatures down slightly to 48 while swapping the 180 ml fans into bottom intake raised the temperature to 51 degrees fractal has already optimized its fan layout here the rvo2 is right alongside the torrent as well comparatively 50 degrees isn't an all-time record breaker the way that the cpu average was the p500a digital averaged 48 degrees for example as did the old rvo2 still the torrentism on the best averages we've recorded recently the fractal meshfy 2xl is all the way on the other end of the chart at 55 degrees average going overboard here in the torrent with stock fans obviously benefited it but the meshfy 2xl could be made better if you spent more money on its cooling of course gpu temperature in the firestrike test was slightly lower than baseline down to 47 degrees that small difference is almost enough to put the torrent at the top of this chart and the sl600m and the p500a are also up there mostly with an error of the torrent our blender test runs only one component at a time reducing thermal load in the cpu rendered pass the cpu averaged 32 degrees handily beating the previous best results by a meaningful amount for our test hardware this is the best case for cpu cooling that we've looked at yet fractal does especially well when less overall heat is generated within the system the gpu averaged 21 degrees when using it to render instead which is tied for the best results on the chart with the lancol 2 mesh and the p500a digital gpu temperatures were good in the original test but the fire strike and blender tests show that when loading the gpu in isolation the torrent excels our standardized fan test uses three noctua fans to compare cases on mostly level ground without the advantages or disadvantages conferred by their stock vent as always these results are imperfect by nature we installed the fans in the same layout as we always do if practical so there's two 140mm intakes and one 120mm rear exhaust but this is not something you should do if you buy the torrent it doesn't make any sense there are advantages and disadvantages to this testing we have a whole methodology piece explaining them and we're running it just because it's something that people often ask for overall the torrent performed impressively well in this test regardless average cpu temperature was just 44 degrees above ambience tied with the p 500a digital and the 7000d airflow and only slightly warmer than the chart topping landcall 215. however none of this really means anything because it's going to come with more fans that are better so again this is just something people ask for a lot but our methodology piece explains what those imperfections are just make sure you understand what they are before you go randomly paste charts on reddit the gpu average in the same test was 55 degrees the removal of the stock bottom intake fans hurt the torrent a lot here putting it on the warm end of the chart but the same is true of the 7000d in the land cool 215 to some extent again the torrent comes with three bottom intake fans so the fact that taking those fans out hurts the gpu thermals really shouldn't blow anyone's mind it makes sense for noise normalized testing we lower the speed of just the case fans to reach 36 dba noise threshold for the whole system that's at 20 inches in the torrent that required lowering the speed of the case fans to 47 to bring the case noise down from 50.8 dba at 100 speed the torrent is the loudest case on our chart when it's at max speed and those 180 ml fans running at 1200 rpm are the reason why on the other hand the size of the fans means that they're still able to move a lot of air at lower speeds average cpu temperature at the reduced noise threshold is 46 degrees above ambient keeping the torrent at the top of this chart as well by beating the lancol 215 even average gpu temperature was 53 degrees above ambient the p500a has an advantage here at 50 degrees average but the torrent holds its own for the most part against the rest of the chart this is a test where open fronted cases with big quiet fans will excel even more so than the torture tests so the case obviously still has some problems we listed a lot of them in the build section most of them are small and we're at a stage where it's it's largely attention to detail things there's already a lot of good attention to detail in this and overall this is a case that it's a lot of times when we kind of like a case but maybe we have some problems with it we'll say it's fine or we'll say uh we don't hate it or we'll say we don't mind recommending it which is one of the strongest recommendations we can give is when we say we don't mind recommending this it's very very rare however that patrick and i together actually both like a case this is one of them it's expensive at 190 dollars but there's a lot of 190 dollars a lot of 200 cases there's a 500 odyssey acts we reviewed recently that we didn't like uh so being expensive doesn't automatically win here in fact a lot of the times you lose if your case is too expensive in our reviews fractal here has done a good job with the torrent we would like to see an option for drive cages more of them somewhere one well the name of course but two it genuinely would do well with them airflow is great for drives uh there's space for it in the top you could hang them down from the front of it and do a vertical mount and slot them in like that you probably fit maybe two or three of them in there and it's also large enough where it does kind of make sense to bring back some hard drive support there's still an audience out there for it that maybe wants a nas in their own system or a raid or whatever it's getting less popular we can understand why frack will cut it but it's something that could have been accommodated and we would have liked to see that even if it's an add-on not big fans of that but our opinions have shifted a little bit over the years with add-ons as the amount of waste cases include has increased fractal does a great job of following up the silver stone rvo2 the rvo2 hasn't really been followed up even by silverstone silverstone has made other cases that are good but the rvo2 was sort of special it was different it did unique things 180 was interesting and it was inverted and bottom intake now this isn't inverted but it does a lot of the other things the rvo2 did so if you have been using an rvo2 or you've liked that case for a long time this is your successor this is the one you buy to replace an rvo2 or to buy it if you never were able to get it to begin with now obviously there's sort of one big point to this case which is it comes with a lot of fans and they're pretty good that means if you are planning to strip the fans out of the case you are losing the majority of the value so if you're planning to go water cooling and you have your own fans to use for that you're starting to waste money here maybe you should get if you want fractal the meshfy 2xl or the o11 dynamic or the fantex and through pro instead that would maybe make more sense in that scenario these fans though i mean 140 is a common radiator size times however many multiples up to three in this case you can keep the fans here and stack them on a radiator just watch out for those clearances we talked about them here there's even 180 ml radiators we haven't tried it however patrick and i both really want to do maybe a live stream build with this case because we'd like to use this case for one of our production systems that's about the highest praise we can give a case here the alphacool monsta radiator looks like it would be fun to mount it as an odd sized radiator on these 180s so overall we like it congratulations fractal you've won the game there's there's no more game after this you have reached end game uh it's not gonna get better so that's a big bar to to live up to on their next one but uh yeah we we can recommend this one if you're in the 200 price class for a case it's expensive if you want something cheaper check out the landley lancole 215. it's a great case for a much lower price you can check out the phantek p 400 or p 500 a if they're in stock and that they're closer to msrp prices that they shipped at and the 011 dynamic is still good if it's around the 130 mark you will have to provide your own fans though so that gives you a range of cases the corsair 4000 d airflow is another good one to look at that now your range is about 80 up to 150 before you get into this class plenty of good stuff out there but if you're spending this much we can say go for it that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like to support this type of in-depth testing where we really get involved in the hardware and figure out if it's good you can also go to patreon.comgamersnexus for behind the scenes videos we published one actually on this case with patrick on camera to share some of his thoughts directly with our patreon backers thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"