I've waited so long to build this PC

**The Experience with Fractal's Meshify 2 Case**

I recently had the opportunity to work with Fractal's Meshify 2 case, and I have to say that it was an experience unlike any other. The fans on this particular build were connected to a RGB hub that is integrated with the radiator, which already seemed like a great idea. However, things took a turn for the worse when I tried to get the fans to change colors. I had installed the motherboard's five-volt addressable RGB header, but no matter what I did, nothing worked. The MSI Dragon Center app was useless in this regard, and even downloading the Mystic Light software didn't seem to make a difference.

I found myself getting frustrated and wondering if it was just user error on my part. But as I delved deeper into the issue, it became clear that something was amiss with the case's design or configuration. It seems that Fractal has stuck with a similar layout for their other cases, including the Meshify 2, which is why I couldn't help but feel like they were rehashing old ideas rather than innovating.

Despite my frustration with the RGB lighting, I have to say that the case itself is quite impressive. The design is premium and high-end, with a lot of features and flexibility that make it suitable for a wide range of users. Cable management was not too shabby, either - while I didn't spend an excessive amount of time on it, the channels did look fairly tidy. One thing that did strike me as nitpicky, however, was the use of plastic channels in some areas.

**The Build and Performance**

When building this system, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement at the prospect of seeing all the lighting through the front panel. Unfortunately, removing the dust filter was necessary to get a better view - which also allowed for more airflow, by the way. While it did make the case feel warmer than I would have liked, that was somewhat mitigated by the excellent performance of the system.

As I loaded up Far Cry 5 at 2560x1440 ultra settings with all graphics maxed out, I was impressed to see a frame rate of around 130-140 FPS. And when I switched to 4K and maxed out the graphics again, I was still getting above 60 frames per second. The performance of this system is truly impressive, and it's a testament to the power of the RTX 3070 and Zen 3 processor.

**The Case: A Love-Hate Relationship**

As much as I enjoyed working with the Meshify 2 case, I couldn't help but feel conflicted about its design. On the one hand, I appreciated the premium look and feel of the case - it's clear that Fractal has put a lot of thought into creating a high-end product. On the other hand, I felt like they had stuck with a layout that was similar to their previous designs, rather than innovating or pushing the boundaries.

In particular, the use of plastic channels in some areas did strike me as questionable. While it's true that this might be a matter of personal preference, I couldn't help but wonder if there were better alternatives available. Overall, however, the case itself is quite impressive - and with a little tweaking, it has the potential to become an even more effective solution for airflow and cable management.

**The Verdict**

In conclusion, my experience with the Meshify 2 case was... mixed. While I was impressed by its performance and features, I couldn't shake the feeling that Fractal had stuck with a design that was familiar rather than innovative. That being said, it's clear that this case has a lot to offer - especially when it comes to airflow and cable management. If you're in the market for a premium case with these features, the Meshify 2 is definitely worth considering. Just be sure to keep an eye out for any potential issues or design flaws, and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right so i don't know if it's just me but i feel like it's been a long time since i actually got excited to build a pc i think mainly because there's been so much new hardware that's come out very recently that i was just kind of waiting for all of it to release before i actually started building more seriously again i mean first we had ampere which kind of launched not really but you know at least i have a couple cards on hand i'm fortunate enough about that and then we had a zen three which just launched very recently at the time of filming actually it hasn't it's launching tomorrow as i'm filming this but by the time you see it obviously it'll it'll already be here and then we've got the radeon rx 6000 series right around the corner which i don't even have a sample of one of those cards yet i'm probably going to at some point watch my review if you haven't yet on that which i haven't made yet but um that is uh is definitely gonna get used in the build at some point too along with zen three so right after right after ampere launched i was a little hes i was still hesitant to put together a sweet pc because i was still holding out for zen three it just i don't know i'm too entitled of a tech youtuber to be like oh let's just pair an rtx 3080 with a ryzen 3000 series cpu oh god yeah i'm pretty i'm pretty privileged i understand that but now that zen 3's here i'm actually really excited to finally pair a brand new cpu and gpu together for the first time in a long time so this is probably going to be uh the freshest build that i've put together in 2020 so far and i'm pretty excited on top of that we also have a new case from fractal fractal design well i say new case but it's it's kind of so it's the meshify 2. it's more a defined 7 than anything else like you'll see when we take a look at the internal layout it's pretty much defined 7 up and down but it's just got the meshify front panel with the mesh obviously for for better airflow and performance and uh yeah it's it's a big boy case this is not the same meshify original measurefi that uh that you know we're going to take a look at the ins and outs of this case as we're going about the build as well and i'm going to introduce the rest of the hardware as we progress the build so i'm just gonna start and um i guess the first thing i should mention is the cpu that we're using this is the amd ryzen 7 5800 x boom today's video is brought to you by slick deals and their super awesome browser extension not only is the extension completely free guys but it automatically finds you the best deals on your favorite retail sites to save you the most money possible and all the deals that it shows you are actually curated by the slick deals community so you only see offers that have been upvoted by other shoppers like you you go to a retailer's website click the slick deals icon and bam you're in deal city population deals i didn't really know what to expect the very first time i used it but literally within seconds i was finding all kinds of offers like there was a b550 motherboard for 30 off or something like that where i was like okay i don't need that but that's a really good deal the extension also finds you any sight related coupons you otherwise might not have seen and it lets you create deal alerts with email and mobile push notifications i mean with black friday and the holidays right around the corner this is like the perfect tool to catch all the deals without doing any of the legwork about 20 million people will be using select deals to help them save money while shopping so again it's completely free and saves you money on stuff like computer hardware need i continue if you like saving money which is a dumb thing to say because who doesn't click on the link in the description below to start using the slick deals browser extension today i kind of wanted to use the 5900x because i do have a sample of that too you should watch our review if you haven't yet but i i also wanted to make this an rtx 3070 build and i just feel like the 8 core 16 thread is is better suited for an rtx 3070. if we were using a 3090 or a 3080 then i would definitely be using the 5900x but there's plenty of other opportunities in the future to uh to use that chip in a build so this is eight core 16 threads and it's a boost to 4.7 gigahertz and i look at that i haven't even i haven't even opened it yet you guys this is the only product today the only computer part i think that you'll actually see me unbox because i have everything else i have a bunch of other stuff just already unboxed i like to save time in the shooting process by unboxing everything before i start recording little behind the scenes fun fact all right and uh no no cooler no wraith cooler with this one because it's uh you know amd's assuming that you're going to add your own third party aftermarket cooler which of course we are so there it is 5800 x still untainted by my disgusting fingertips until now and we're going to slot this inside of a very lovely motherboard from asus this is their rog strix b550e gaming pretty attractive board here and it's got these little pink accents that you know are either going to bother you a lot or you won't care much i feel like most of it gets covered up by the gpu anyway it's right there on the chipset and the rest of it it's very very discreet still but i think we are going to have some rgb in this system i think i'm just going to make all the rgb pink though to match the board as subtle as it is i i haven't really done any pink related builds in a long time i think since hotline 2.0 but okay sorry about that i just confirmed that the cooler that we're using does in fact use the stock mounting brackets here so we can leave those on perfect cpu installation continue all right oh that's beautiful so so nice all right um memory is next we got four of these sticks i thought that this was a 32 gig kit it's actually 64 gigs this is corsair dominator rgb i think that's the full name their naming schemes confuse me these days but they're actually 16 gigabyte modules so we have a 64 gig kit here which again is a little overkill for the system that we're building obviously it's nice if you're doing things like video editing or really utilizing it but we're only going to use two of these sticks and i'm sure you know it's obviously not recommended you want to use all the sticks that came with your kit just for just to ensure full performance and compatibility but i i don't care i'm going to do it my way and sticks are installed just like that maybe i should have installed the cooler first that's fine it's an easy cooler to install and it is the fractal design and we're going fractal fanboy today they're celsius plus s36 so this is the s36 360 millimeter model i really like this aio it's just so simple i mean it's got that scandinavian minimalism that they're always so proud of i like it too i have used this cooler before it's very nice easy to install so let me go ahead and get that on there i can't do that one-handed be right back okay that is complete water block installed what are we missing m.2 m.2 ssd all right uh i don't i don't actually have a pci gen4 drive on hand that's uh that's not in use right now with a different system but i do have this nice sn550 from wd uh so yeah so just a one terabyte wd blue sn550 very nice very nice and reliable drive got really high marks on a nantech and uh i've been using this in other systems here and there so this will be a nice nice little uh boot drive for us for now let's go ahead and install it on the top m.2 slot of the board because this is wired directly to the pcie lanes of the cpu uh i can always i can never like tell when it's fully unscrewed there's always a couple threads left that i that i miss all right there we go okay let's get him in i don't even think i need it it's just for just don't don't copy me in any of it don't ever do what i'm doing right now i'm just gonna ignore it oh you know what i should do though is take this off yeah come on come on come on there we go oh boy oh boy oh boy anyone uh anyone want to be a cameraman for the channel i could probably use one of those come on come on just do it all right there you go all right um yeah you know technically you should you should put the screw down just to keep it stable and stuff but i'm i'm lazy okay let's talk about the case shall we because we're pretty much ready for case installation we're gonna start well actually we have to get the fans on the radiator first which i might do in a time lapse or something because that's boring uh so let's talk about this case okay so meshify 2 what's what's new about it well well it's you know we'll get to the inside when we get to it but as far as the outside goes we get a pretty straightforward front panel mic and headphone jacks usb 3.1 gen 2 type c nice clicky power button that is recessed as well as a uh not so easy to press reset button but that's what you want you don't want to accidentally hit that and then two usb 3.0 ports right there so very straightforward io we also have a nice front mesh panel and it's different it's a little bit different so it's got these sort of like this indent that goes all the way around sort of like a hollow bezel you know outside of the frame and then there's also this uh fractal logo you know new newish fractal logo and it's sort of like a handle because it's popping out and if you pull it so first of all you've got some mounting points here for fans you can do up to a 360 millimeter radiator you could also do a 280 of course does come included this whole case comes included with three 140 millimeter fans they are x2 gp14s and uh the cool thing about this guy is that you can just pop it out like so it detaches completely and then from here you've got two feet that hold it together while you film it and if you pull up oh removable dust filter yeah so that's built into the door and you can uh essentially remove it without having to physically remove the i guess the the frame the main frame of of the front panel because it's still intact here you can remove it let me just get rid of the power supply dust filter first which is full length covers the full depth of the case but you can take this frame off completely too and it's uh it's not tethered to anything there's no wires connecting it to the case so that's nice but you don't really even have to remove this in order to do a lot of the things that you normally need to do like clean the dust filter or install fans because you can see with this outer frame installed you can still access all the fans like all the fan screws are accessible and stuff so that just makes your life a little bit easier i'm gonna go ahead and put this aside for now the top handle is also fully removable so you just yank it from the back aha and it does have does have mesh there oh one thing i should mention one thing i forgot to mention about the front panel is that you can the the manual the actual user's manual suggests as an option that you can completely remove the dust filter here and just leave it just leave it uninstalled if you want more airflow obviously that means you're probably going to end up with more dust in your case you might have to clean it more often but if you are really trying to maximize the the amount of air that's going through this case then they do they do suggest that you can remove this 24 7 if you want back to this top panel just a nice mesh material here not super fine because this is the actual dust filter which has the fine mesh and that okay so i see you just pull it here i did read the manual so i'm sort of uh these are educated guesses that i'm making and then yeah so dust filter right there and then you can go a step further and actually take this whole piece off you can completely it's modular um which is definitely new uh to the meshify series now the side panels you have to remove the side panel first in order to remove the top and this is completely tool-less there's just a little latch here pull it comes right off but if you're transporting this case or you know there's a system built in it and you just want to be extra careful you can actually okay this is when you would actually need to remove this frame is to access uh screw holes there are some screw holes right right here right at the top there that little hole that uh you can actually take a a screw screw it in so that out that will secure the side panel to the case for extra security all right let's go ahead and pop this guy off which is uh tinted pretty well good old tint in there so you're going to want to really get some bright lights in there if you want to show it off all right i'm going to put the side panel here and then you've got two screws you've got one here and then another one there once you remove those you should be able to remove this top panel completely let's do that but with those two screws gone this should just come oh yeah it was super easy just lifts right off so this is gonna make it a lot easier for you to install fans radiators all the above and uh it also just opens up the case completely almost completely once you have this panel removed i mean that doesn't really do much for for this side but you can just see like how much more open it is to work in which makes it easier it just does one less you know piece of frame in your way you can really get in there and do your business so uh yeah that's that's pretty sweet that's definitely a new feature to the meshify let's uh go ahead and install this radiator shall we actually you know what instead of mounting the radiator to the top of the case i'm actually going to mount it to the front and then we're going to put some additional fans at the top and we're going to replace that one at the back so i actually have these prisma rgb fans from fractal three of them came included with the celsius cooler so those will go right there and then we've got two i've got two more 140 millimeter versions our models that uh that will go one at the top and one at the back so i guess i can install one of these bad boys onto that guy it's also worth mentioning that you can put up to a 420 millimeter radiator at the top of the case which is pretty impressive so you've got up to a 420 360 and you can even do up to a 280 at the bottom not not too shabby in terms of a custom water cooling support uh this thing definitely has it all also this plate does this case does include a multi bracket which right here this multi bracket you can put two and a half inch three and a half inch drives or uh water cooling pumps reservoirs and stuff like that and then that multi bracket can get mounted right here onto this plate so you can see there's two plates here you can remove this one if you want more clearance for longer radiators additional fans and then you can remove this one completely if you want even more clearance for thicker rads push pull stuff like that or you can leave this installed and mount the multi bracket and either drive or your water cooling reservoir slash pump right there pretty cool i guess while we're here i should probably talk about some of the other features internally before it gets filled up like i said earlier the layout here is very similar to the define 7 which is a good thing there's a lot of flexibility here so there's a dual sort of layout design where you can actually take this plate and move it up front and then with these trays you can mount three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives i think you can do like eight of them like eight of them boom boom like right right here against this wall or i guess behind the wall you've also got a drive cage well we'll get to the drive cage but there's two more drive trays underneath the power supply shroud bear in mind that the case only comes included with four of these trays but you can you can buy more separately if you really want to deck it out i think the total number of drives that you can put in here simultaneously is like 17 or 18 drives it's something crazy so if you're trying to build a server i would i would definitely consider this case just for that reason alone but you've also got two two and a half inch drive mounts right here that are pre-installed at the back behind the motherboard tray you can relocate those however if you want to right here on top of the psu shroud and you can also buy additional additional trays so if you wanted to have four or four of those ssd trays you have two here two in the back all at the same time tons of options another cool thing you can do with uh with this multi bracket um apart from you know mounting a drive right behind here you can also put it at the top like you can mount it to this thing i think so like you can actually have two more drives boom boom if you want to put like two three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives at the top of your case which is kind of an unconventional spot for it but hey if it works and you need it that's an option as well or you can put a multi bracket at the bottom of the case in between the psu and the existing drive tray if you wanted to add an additional drive right down there so that's how you get so many drives to fit inside of this mid tower just bear in mind that you'll need you'll need to buy additional trays and multi brackets and stuff if you really want to use it to its fullest in that in that capacity um but right out of the box with four of these trays and two ssd trays along with the drive cage i think you can mount up to like nine nine drives in here so you know you can mix and match two and a half inch and three and a half inch and stuff so yeah there's just a ton of ton of storage if you want okay let's get the fans installed get the fans on the radiator get the radiator installed install the motherboard and carry on okay motherboard's going down and there is a raised standoff in the center which is always nice helps you align the motherboard right right up there to the i o shield which is uh pre-installed on this motherboard of course the rest of the motherboard standoffs are also pre-installed so we're just zipping right along here i'm not even gonna install all the screws i'm just gonna do like four or five okay motherboard installed i guess it's worth noting that we've got some nice rubber grommets here that go pretty much all up and down uh the side of the motherboard there's also a rubber grommet on the power supply shroud that's kind of at the bottom right of the board where your front panel connectors would most likely be and then another cutout that's not grommeted but it's just a small cutout for like hd audio and stuff oh yeah this board is atx but this case actually supports up to e-atx i think up to 285 millimeters wide for the motherboard so that's pretty handy removing some fans oops oh yeah these oh nice these are these are tool-less i like the fact that these are tool-less completely easy to pop off that's that's nice radiator installed all right went in pretty easy uh the nice thing about the meshify well i guess depending on who you ask personal preference and tastes um you do get to see the any lighting if you have rgb fans of the front here you will see that lighting straight through the front panel because it is all mesh and it'll probably look even brighter if you choose to remove the dust filter um but uh yeah so we got three fans here it's looking good okay good and bad really quick so the good thing one good thing i like about this system is that these are these panels you can see i i only had to remove a small one i can still leave the big one intact which uh which is nice because it cleans it up and stuff but what i was gonna say is i really like the fact that these are tool-less you probably shouldn't undo it like that but um but they are completely tool-less which is nice pops right back in super easily the bad not super bad but just a little bit an inconvenience is the routing holes the routing holes where you route your fan cables through with the front here are very small it's kind of hard to show you guys but sort of see they're out behind actually behind the frame and then through this other part here so they're just small holes you know they could be a little bit bigger i had to fish around for a while more than i would have liked to but apart from that everything's looking smooth so far next up power supply we do have a cooler master b750 fully modular unit and we do have some custom sleeved cables as well which we'll throw on at the very end cooler master let's do this uh so let's actually go around here okay so i guess it's a good time to talk about the backside don't mind the crazy cables coming off of our fans and stuff um but uh okay where do we begin so obviously we've got this modular panel here this tray that can again move forward and then you can slot in a ridiculous number of these these drives i think it goes like this actually will go up and down i'm not going to do all that right now because you guys have already seen the defined seven you know how that works for the most part um but uh yeah you also have a multi bracket here you can pop around in other locations as we mentioned there is also velcro straps with these cable channels these plasticable channels that i think i first saw these plastic channels being used on like nzxt cases and then other brands have started to use them um i am on the fence about them i feel like they often for me get in the way more than they actually help what would be helpful is if i don't know how manufacturers would do this but if they were just like if these were modular and you can move you could move them stick them anywhere you wanted because sometimes when i'm trying to route cables these won't be in the perfect position that i need them to be in so they'll be like a little too high or too low which you know forces me to go up and around or it's just it's just a pain it could be a pain in me so what i would suggest to manufacturers is you can keep this design but make it more flexible instead of just having them fixed in these positions i don't know if you could just like you know move them move them wherever you want you'd have to have like a grid of holes and stuff on the motherboard tray but your motherboard would be covering it up anyway so theoretically it's possible um but uh that's just that's just how i feel about them that being said the velcro straps do seem pretty sturdy they're not super cheap or anything up top you may have noticed we've got a fan controller here so there's actually one two three four five six three pin fan headers right there and then you've got three four pin pwm fan headers and then of course we've got sata power thank god it's not molex so that's that's going to power it and then you've got one more cable uh that's going to connect to your motherboard a a system fan header on yamobo and uh and that's pretty sweet so we can actually wire up some of our fans uh to this this controller today that'll be handy we also have this thing this kind of weird is this on the define seven if it was i don't remember i actually didn't even do a defined seven review so that's probably why i'm not sure but there's this weird thing it's just a cable cover i don't know why it doesn't make too much sense to me because this side panel isn't glass it's just a regular well you can't see it over there but it's just a regular side panel you can't see through it so why is this necessary i don't know is this just for like really really anal people who just need to know that every single cable is tucked away as best as possible i'm not sure i probably won't use it i think it's i kind of think it's annoying but here's a look at our drive cage two trays right there these are the same trays i believe as uh that's not it as these ones so you've got four of these you got six in total two of them are pre-installed at this cage which can be removed completely or you can slide it over to the right or left depending on how much clearance you want for radiators your power supply a drive right here in the middle on a multi-bracket and stuff like that uh let's install the psu i think we pretty much covered the back here oh one thing i forgot to mention about the top fill port if you want to add a fill port there's a little cut out there so it just makes hopping off your loop or just filling it completely much easier all right power supply time all right 20ish minutes later i have finished all the cable management on this side of the case and i gotta say it's uh it's working pretty good it's working for me i think the meshify 2 here does a pretty good job of cutting all the cables there's lots of tie-down points well velcro straps i should say there's no actual tie-down points in the traditional sense but you do have velcro straps and this is kind of what i was talking about earlier how sometimes these things aren't optimally placed for example this this connector is obviously not going to be able to fit in these channels so i kind of had to just detour it around it um otherwise uh if it went on top the side panel wouldn't uh close it would just be popping out too much so it's stuff like that like if i could have just shifted this like put these on rails you know ooh that's a good idea all you casemakers are getting these free ideas golden ideas just just put them on rails so that we can just slide them wherever we want and then even even better if we could even articulate them counterclockwise or clockwise if you could like rotate them a little bit because like i could have i could have probably used a little bit of rotation on this one like i would have put this one a little higher maybe rotated it like 30 degrees just because this is kind of coming at an angle like just that level of granularity would be would be nice to see because i feel like cable management on cases has pretty much gone unchanged for a long time there hasn't really been a lot of innovation there these channels were a cool idea at first and now i think it's time that we move them forward in some ways so uh but apart from that plenty of space underneath the power supply shroud for all of your excess cables so that just makes things so much easier and tidy not not necessarily tidy down here but it makes the rest of it look really nice and you can just kind of tell it looks fairly clean back here despite having what five connected rgb fans like there's just and there's two wires coming off of each of those fans so we got 10 fan cables uh you know a bunch of rgb stuff and still we managed to to clean it up nicely doesn't look super cluttered or anything i did have to spend a little bit of time but a little bit of time goes a long way and we are pretty much ready for the last component of the build which is our graphics card this bad boy out of here this is the msi rtx 3070 gaming x trio and it is lovely it is absolutely beautiful it's a really attractive card if you guys remember i also bet my rtx 3080 gaming x trio on a game of beer pong with my cousin and agreed to give it to him in full if he beat me at the game so if you haven't watched that video yet i'm just gonna shamelessly plug it because it's an awesome video go check it out um but uh why don't we go ahead and install this guy before we do i wanted to point out a couple things about the graphics card area and stuff okay i'm gonna have one really buff arm and one super weak arm all right so um what i was gonna say here is that you have one two three four five six seven expansion slots going horizontally and then you also have two more vertical so you can actually mount this mount gpus vertically in this case although you will need to buy a sold separately adapter bracket uh riser cable is what is the word i'm looking for riser cable ribbon cable whatever uh that's gonna need to be purchased separately and that will allow you to boot mount your gpu just like that now depending on your graphics card it is going to get those fans a little bit closer to that tempered glass side panel than than you're probably comfortable with but don't fear there's also this fractal design now makes their own vertical riser bracket cable mod has one very similar to this uh but basically what this does is it pretty much fills all of your horizontal expansion slots and puts the uh the actual pcie slot right smack more or less right smack in the middle of your case so it does push the graphics card back a little bit oh these tubes are in the way it does push the graphics card back further into your case so that your fans aren't pressed up against the panel your side panel um which is obviously uh not good so uh we're not going to use that we're just going to install it horizontally um i don't want to deal i don't want to open another box i'm ready for this build to be done as fun as it is i just want to see it in action so we're going to go ahead and mount this guy and bear in mind we have plenty of clearance for giant graphics cards in the case's current configuration but if we wanted to install a bunch of drives and we wanted to pop this panel and bring it to the front and have a bunch of drive trays that would significantly reduce the amount of gpu clearance you have and i don't think this gpu would actually make it it's not not quite not quite gonna fit there but uh without it you know in the current configuration you've got room for days i can't imagine there's a modern day gpu that wouldn't fit in the case and its current configuration even with uh radiator and vans the front so let's go ahead and get this installed and finish off this build all right the build's done and it's looking good but before i show you the inside of it i wanted to configure all of the leds to be pink first um i don't want you to see all the unicorn vomit shameful but before i can do that i need to obviously boot the system get into windows and change all the settings there but i can't do that because this motherboard needs a bios update in order for it to support the zen3 ryzen 5000 series processor so thank the lords of asus that they included a bios flashback feature on this board otherwise i would have had to swap out the cpu for an older generation chip and then i would have had to do the bios update that way so this is saving me a ton of time all i got to do now is go to the product page click on support this is a quick little mini tutorial i suppose and then uh just update your bios bios and forever there it is and uh oh there's nothing here oh god no don't tell me the bios isn't here or ready hold on hold on fresh oh god oh thank god okay so if your bios isn't showing up on an asus product page at a support page just hit f5 and that seems to fix it so here we go here we go this is the one that you want this is a gasa a gasa adjacent whatever uh e or what is it 1.1.0.0 i think it needs to be that or newer in order for it to add support for zen3 so i'm going to go ahead and download that and we should be bios flashbacking in just a bit all right into the port you go and i think we just hold this down oh i see a light see you light blinking that means it's working i think okay we'll be right back hopefully it works all right the light turned off so i think it finished let's try it out it goes nothing please give me a sign oh come on come on come on come on this isn't looking good fans are definitely working oh yeah oh yeah oh oh yeah oh yeah all right cool all right so uh it looks like we'll be able to get into windows just fine at this point and we'll circle back once all the leds are configured it should look pretty sweet oh there it goes it's going it's going okay all right so i tried configuring the rgb lights to be all pink because that's you know the theme i was going for and then i was just reminded how freaking garbage rgb is in in pcs like the pc implementation for rgb is still hot garbage i tried for like an hour guys to get everything pink which sounds like such an easy thing to do it should be a simple task but it was not and i'm just going to show you the build in all of its unicorn vomit glory because i gave up on trying to make it all pink i'll briefly explain what what i was going through but you've heard it all before you've heard it all before when you have like conflicting brands like different brands you know it's not all cohesive it's all spread out you've got different applications that you have to use for each component and that can cause conflicts and sometimes things just don't work it's all funky it's all mess it's all a mess so i have like corsair iq that was the only application that was somewhat working that was working for the uh for the ddr4 memory there and then i had asus aura sync which is now apparently integrated with the armory crate thing which is stupid i always try to avoid installing that and then i actually had to that didn't even friggin work so like the the aio the fractal aio and the fans well the fans are connected to the actual uh fan in rgb hub that's integrated with the radiator and then there's a cable that goes from the the water block all the way to the uh five volt addressable rgb header on the motherboard so it's an asus motherboard you'd think okay asus or sync just tell that header to change colors that didn't work nothing worked nothing it didn't like there was no response whatsoever so i don't know i don't know i you know i tend to think like oh it's user error i'm just messing up i'm an idiot which is true but no this time like it just wasn't working nothing was working dragon center msi dragon center useless i didn't even see a lighting section there was no lighting area i tried to download mystic light that didn't work so i don't know if they just don't have support yet for rtx 30 series or what but i wasn't getting anywhere so i gave up and here's the build i don't know why i'm so angry i i know i am angry but i shouldn't be at the same time because it still turned out to be a very nice looking lovely pc uh and you can definitely see all the lighting right through the front panel there i did remove the front dust filter so you can see the lighting a bit better and it's getting more airflow and there's definitely air moving through the system it feels feels pretty cool in here i mean it's definitely a little bit warmer now but we have far cry 5 writing up more on that in a sec but um yeah i just want to quickly say that this is a really really awesome case you know i feel conflicted about at the same time because it's more or less a defined seven with a couple tweaks right it's not exactly defined seven but a lot of similarities a lot of the same dna which is good in a way because you know if it's not broken don't fix it but at a certain point you kind of want to see a company change things up a little bit and i think we've been wanting that from fractal for a long time they did that with the defined seven so that was good that was a real leap forward i think but now it's like they're just kind of copying that same layout with their other cases like the meshify 2. so i think they have a little bit of time they can still rehash it a few more times since the define 7's fairly new but at some point i don't want them to keep this layout for as long as they did with the previous defined series right they just kept rehashing it beating the dead horse so uh but that said it's still a really lovely case it's it's very premium quite high-end definitely a lot more uh features and flexibility than your og meshfy that's for sure and uh cable management not too shabby you know i didn't spend a whole lot of time but it looks fairly tidy so that's good i'm still not a huge fan of these plastic channels i'll have to do something about that but uh just tons of mounting support for radiators and drives um so you know really depending on what you want to do this thing can handle more or less anything you throw at it there were a couple nitpicky things that i had here and there about the case you know it's no case it's perfect but overall nothing was a deal breaker and i'd say that uh if you're in the market for a fairly premium case with lots of airflow this is uh definitely worth your consideration but before i sign off i just wanted to quickly show you guys a little demo here far cry 5. we are at 2560 by 1440 ultra settings completely maxed out graphically and fraps counters a little small but you can see we're getting around 130 140 fps yeah that's what an rtx 3070 and a zen 3 processor will get you right now so pretty awesome pretty awesome performance honestly it's uh very impressive let me go ahead and switch it over to 4k just for shiz and giggles and we are still getting a very respectable 70 80 fps yes well above 60. running at 4k max settings and a triple-a title oh this is nice oh it's so nice the only thing that could make it nicer is if the lights were pink but can't have everything i guess but thank you guys so much for watching this video if you enjoyed it toss a look before you go and get subscribed more tech content on the way we've got a lot more coming soon some fun projects coming right up so stay tuned for that guys thank you so much for watching have a good one and i'll see y'all in the next videoall right so i don't know if it's just me but i feel like it's been a long time since i actually got excited to build a pc i think mainly because there's been so much new hardware that's come out very recently that i was just kind of waiting for all of it to release before i actually started building more seriously again i mean first we had ampere which kind of launched not really but you know at least i have a couple cards on hand i'm fortunate enough about that and then we had a zen three which just launched very recently at the time of filming actually it hasn't it's launching tomorrow as i'm filming this but by the time you see it obviously it'll it'll already be here and then we've got the radeon rx 6000 series right around the corner which i don't even have a sample of one of those cards yet i'm probably going to at some point watch my review if you haven't yet on that which i haven't made yet but um that is uh is definitely gonna get used in the build at some point too along with zen three so right after right after ampere launched i was a little hes i was still hesitant to put together a sweet pc because i was still holding out for zen three it just i don't know i'm too entitled of a tech youtuber to be like oh let's just pair an rtx 3080 with a ryzen 3000 series cpu oh god yeah i'm pretty i'm pretty privileged i understand that but now that zen 3's here i'm actually really excited to finally pair a brand new cpu and gpu together for the first time in a long time so this is probably going to be uh the freshest build that i've put together in 2020 so far and i'm pretty excited on top of that we also have a new case from fractal fractal design well i say new case but it's it's kind of so it's the meshify 2. it's more a defined 7 than anything else like you'll see when we take a look at the internal layout it's pretty much defined 7 up and down but it's just got the meshify front panel with the mesh obviously for for better airflow and performance and uh yeah it's it's a big boy case this is not the same meshify original measurefi that uh that you know we're going to take a look at the ins and outs of this case as we're going about the build as well and i'm going to introduce the rest of the hardware as we progress the build so i'm just gonna start and um i guess the first thing i should mention is the cpu that we're using this is the amd ryzen 7 5800 x boom today's video is brought to you by slick deals and their super awesome browser extension not only is the extension completely free guys but it automatically finds you the best deals on your favorite retail sites to save you the most money possible and all the deals that it shows you are actually curated by the slick deals community so you only see offers that have been upvoted by other shoppers like you you go to a retailer's website click the slick deals icon and bam you're in deal city population deals i didn't really know what to expect the very first time i used it but literally within seconds i was finding all kinds of offers like there was a b550 motherboard for 30 off or something like that where i was like okay i don't need that but that's a really good deal the extension also finds you any sight related coupons you otherwise might not have seen and it lets you create deal alerts with email and mobile push notifications i mean with black friday and the holidays right around the corner this is like the perfect tool to catch all the deals without doing any of the legwork about 20 million people will be using select deals to help them save money while shopping so again it's completely free and saves you money on stuff like computer hardware need i continue if you like saving money which is a dumb thing to say because who doesn't click on the link in the description below to start using the slick deals browser extension today i kind of wanted to use the 5900x because i do have a sample of that too you should watch our review if you haven't yet but i i also wanted to make this an rtx 3070 build and i just feel like the 8 core 16 thread is is better suited for an rtx 3070. if we were using a 3090 or a 3080 then i would definitely be using the 5900x but there's plenty of other opportunities in the future to uh to use that chip in a build so this is eight core 16 threads and it's a boost to 4.7 gigahertz and i look at that i haven't even i haven't even opened it yet you guys this is the only product today the only computer part i think that you'll actually see me unbox because i have everything else i have a bunch of other stuff just already unboxed i like to save time in the shooting process by unboxing everything before i start recording little behind the scenes fun fact all right and uh no no cooler no wraith cooler with this one because it's uh you know amd's assuming that you're going to add your own third party aftermarket cooler which of course we are so there it is 5800 x still untainted by my disgusting fingertips until now and we're going to slot this inside of a very lovely motherboard from asus this is their rog strix b550e gaming pretty attractive board here and it's got these little pink accents that you know are either going to bother you a lot or you won't care much i feel like most of it gets covered up by the gpu anyway it's right there on the chipset and the rest of it it's very very discreet still but i think we are going to have some rgb in this system i think i'm just going to make all the rgb pink though to match the board as subtle as it is i i haven't really done any pink related builds in a long time i think since hotline 2.0 but okay sorry about that i just confirmed that the cooler that we're using does in fact use the stock mounting brackets here so we can leave those on perfect cpu installation continue all right oh that's beautiful so so nice all right um memory is next we got four of these sticks i thought that this was a 32 gig kit it's actually 64 gigs this is corsair dominator rgb i think that's the full name their naming schemes confuse me these days but they're actually 16 gigabyte modules so we have a 64 gig kit here which again is a little overkill for the system that we're building obviously it's nice if you're doing things like video editing or really utilizing it but we're only going to use two of these sticks and i'm sure you know it's obviously not recommended you want to use all the sticks that came with your kit just for just to ensure full performance and compatibility but i i don't care i'm going to do it my way and sticks are installed just like that maybe i should have installed the cooler first that's fine it's an easy cooler to install and it is the fractal design and we're going fractal fanboy today they're celsius plus s36 so this is the s36 360 millimeter model i really like this aio it's just so simple i mean it's got that scandinavian minimalism that they're always so proud of i like it too i have used this cooler before it's very nice easy to install so let me go ahead and get that on there i can't do that one-handed be right back okay that is complete water block installed what are we missing m.2 m.2 ssd all right uh i don't i don't actually have a pci gen4 drive on hand that's uh that's not in use right now with a different system but i do have this nice sn550 from wd uh so yeah so just a one terabyte wd blue sn550 very nice very nice and reliable drive got really high marks on a nantech and uh i've been using this in other systems here and there so this will be a nice nice little uh boot drive for us for now let's go ahead and install it on the top m.2 slot of the board because this is wired directly to the pcie lanes of the cpu uh i can always i can never like tell when it's fully unscrewed there's always a couple threads left that i that i miss all right there we go okay let's get him in i don't even think i need it it's just for just don't don't copy me in any of it don't ever do what i'm doing right now i'm just gonna ignore it oh you know what i should do though is take this off yeah come on come on come on there we go oh boy oh boy oh boy anyone uh anyone want to be a cameraman for the channel i could probably use one of those come on come on just do it all right there you go all right um yeah you know technically you should you should put the screw down just to keep it stable and stuff but i'm i'm lazy okay let's talk about the case shall we because we're pretty much ready for case installation we're gonna start well actually we have to get the fans on the radiator first which i might do in a time lapse or something because that's boring uh so let's talk about this case okay so meshify 2 what's what's new about it well well it's you know we'll get to the inside when we get to it but as far as the outside goes we get a pretty straightforward front panel mic and headphone jacks usb 3.1 gen 2 type c nice clicky power button that is recessed as well as a uh not so easy to press reset button but that's what you want you don't want to accidentally hit that and then two usb 3.0 ports right there so very straightforward io we also have a nice front mesh panel and it's different it's a little bit different so it's got these sort of like this indent that goes all the way around sort of like a hollow bezel you know outside of the frame and then there's also this uh fractal logo you know new newish fractal logo and it's sort of like a handle because it's popping out and if you pull it so first of all you've got some mounting points here for fans you can do up to a 360 millimeter radiator you could also do a 280 of course does come included this whole case comes included with three 140 millimeter fans they are x2 gp14s and uh the cool thing about this guy is that you can just pop it out like so it detaches completely and then from here you've got two feet that hold it together while you film it and if you pull up oh removable dust filter yeah so that's built into the door and you can uh essentially remove it without having to physically remove the i guess the the frame the main frame of of the front panel because it's still intact here you can remove it let me just get rid of the power supply dust filter first which is full length covers the full depth of the case but you can take this frame off completely too and it's uh it's not tethered to anything there's no wires connecting it to the case so that's nice but you don't really even have to remove this in order to do a lot of the things that you normally need to do like clean the dust filter or install fans because you can see with this outer frame installed you can still access all the fans like all the fan screws are accessible and stuff so that just makes your life a little bit easier i'm gonna go ahead and put this aside for now the top handle is also fully removable so you just yank it from the back aha and it does have does have mesh there oh one thing i should mention one thing i forgot to mention about the front panel is that you can the the manual the actual user's manual suggests as an option that you can completely remove the dust filter here and just leave it just leave it uninstalled if you want more airflow obviously that means you're probably going to end up with more dust in your case you might have to clean it more often but if you are really trying to maximize the the amount of air that's going through this case then they do they do suggest that you can remove this 24 7 if you want back to this top panel just a nice mesh material here not super fine because this is the actual dust filter which has the fine mesh and that okay so i see you just pull it here i did read the manual so i'm sort of uh these are educated guesses that i'm making and then yeah so dust filter right there and then you can go a step further and actually take this whole piece off you can completely it's modular um which is definitely new uh to the meshify series now the side panels you have to remove the side panel first in order to remove the top and this is completely tool-less there's just a little latch here pull it comes right off but if you're transporting this case or you know there's a system built in it and you just want to be extra careful you can actually okay this is when you would actually need to remove this frame is to access uh screw holes there are some screw holes right right here right at the top there that little hole that uh you can actually take a a screw screw it in so that out that will secure the side panel to the case for extra security all right let's go ahead and pop this guy off which is uh tinted pretty well good old tint in there so you're going to want to really get some bright lights in there if you want to show it off all right i'm going to put the side panel here and then you've got two screws you've got one here and then another one there once you remove those you should be able to remove this top panel completely let's do that but with those two screws gone this should just come oh yeah it was super easy just lifts right off so this is gonna make it a lot easier for you to install fans radiators all the above and uh it also just opens up the case completely almost completely once you have this panel removed i mean that doesn't really do much for for this side but you can just see like how much more open it is to work in which makes it easier it just does one less you know piece of frame in your way you can really get in there and do your business so uh yeah that's that's pretty sweet that's definitely a new feature to the meshify let's uh go ahead and install this radiator shall we actually you know what instead of mounting the radiator to the top of the case i'm actually going to mount it to the front and then we're going to put some additional fans at the top and we're going to replace that one at the back so i actually have these prisma rgb fans from fractal three of them came included with the celsius cooler so those will go right there and then we've got two i've got two more 140 millimeter versions our models that uh that will go one at the top and one at the back so i guess i can install one of these bad boys onto that guy it's also worth mentioning that you can put up to a 420 millimeter radiator at the top of the case which is pretty impressive so you've got up to a 420 360 and you can even do up to a 280 at the bottom not not too shabby in terms of a custom water cooling support uh this thing definitely has it all also this plate does this case does include a multi bracket which right here this multi bracket you can put two and a half inch three and a half inch drives or uh water cooling pumps reservoirs and stuff like that and then that multi bracket can get mounted right here onto this plate so you can see there's two plates here you can remove this one if you want more clearance for longer radiators additional fans and then you can remove this one completely if you want even more clearance for thicker rads push pull stuff like that or you can leave this installed and mount the multi bracket and either drive or your water cooling reservoir slash pump right there pretty cool i guess while we're here i should probably talk about some of the other features internally before it gets filled up like i said earlier the layout here is very similar to the define 7 which is a good thing there's a lot of flexibility here so there's a dual sort of layout design where you can actually take this plate and move it up front and then with these trays you can mount three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives i think you can do like eight of them like eight of them boom boom like right right here against this wall or i guess behind the wall you've also got a drive cage well we'll get to the drive cage but there's two more drive trays underneath the power supply shroud bear in mind that the case only comes included with four of these trays but you can you can buy more separately if you really want to deck it out i think the total number of drives that you can put in here simultaneously is like 17 or 18 drives it's something crazy so if you're trying to build a server i would i would definitely consider this case just for that reason alone but you've also got two two and a half inch drive mounts right here that are pre-installed at the back behind the motherboard tray you can relocate those however if you want to right here on top of the psu shroud and you can also buy additional additional trays so if you wanted to have four or four of those ssd trays you have two here two in the back all at the same time tons of options another cool thing you can do with uh with this multi bracket um apart from you know mounting a drive right behind here you can also put it at the top like you can mount it to this thing i think so like you can actually have two more drives boom boom if you want to put like two three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives at the top of your case which is kind of an unconventional spot for it but hey if it works and you need it that's an option as well or you can put a multi bracket at the bottom of the case in between the psu and the existing drive tray if you wanted to add an additional drive right down there so that's how you get so many drives to fit inside of this mid tower just bear in mind that you'll need you'll need to buy additional trays and multi brackets and stuff if you really want to use it to its fullest in that in that capacity um but right out of the box with four of these trays and two ssd trays along with the drive cage i think you can mount up to like nine nine drives in here so you know you can mix and match two and a half inch and three and a half inch and stuff so yeah there's just a ton of ton of storage if you want okay let's get the fans installed get the fans on the radiator get the radiator installed install the motherboard and carry on okay motherboard's going down and there is a raised standoff in the center which is always nice helps you align the motherboard right right up there to the i o shield which is uh pre-installed on this motherboard of course the rest of the motherboard standoffs are also pre-installed so we're just zipping right along here i'm not even gonna install all the screws i'm just gonna do like four or five okay motherboard installed i guess it's worth noting that we've got some nice rubber grommets here that go pretty much all up and down uh the side of the motherboard there's also a rubber grommet on the power supply shroud that's kind of at the bottom right of the board where your front panel connectors would most likely be and then another cutout that's not grommeted but it's just a small cutout for like hd audio and stuff oh yeah this board is atx but this case actually supports up to e-atx i think up to 285 millimeters wide for the motherboard so that's pretty handy removing some fans oops oh yeah these oh nice these are these are tool-less i like the fact that these are tool-less completely easy to pop off that's that's nice radiator installed all right went in pretty easy uh the nice thing about the meshify well i guess depending on who you ask personal preference and tastes um you do get to see the any lighting if you have rgb fans of the front here you will see that lighting straight through the front panel because it is all mesh and it'll probably look even brighter if you choose to remove the dust filter um but uh yeah so we got three fans here it's looking good okay good and bad really quick so the good thing one good thing i like about this system is that these are these panels you can see i i only had to remove a small one i can still leave the big one intact which uh which is nice because it cleans it up and stuff but what i was gonna say is i really like the fact that these are tool-less you probably shouldn't undo it like that but um but they are completely tool-less which is nice pops right back in super easily the bad not super bad but just a little bit an inconvenience is the routing holes the routing holes where you route your fan cables through with the front here are very small it's kind of hard to show you guys but sort of see they're out behind actually behind the frame and then through this other part here so they're just small holes you know they could be a little bit bigger i had to fish around for a while more than i would have liked to but apart from that everything's looking smooth so far next up power supply we do have a cooler master b750 fully modular unit and we do have some custom sleeved cables as well which we'll throw on at the very end cooler master let's do this uh so let's actually go around here okay so i guess it's a good time to talk about the backside don't mind the crazy cables coming off of our fans and stuff um but uh okay where do we begin so obviously we've got this modular panel here this tray that can again move forward and then you can slot in a ridiculous number of these these drives i think it goes like this actually will go up and down i'm not going to do all that right now because you guys have already seen the defined seven you know how that works for the most part um but uh yeah you also have a multi bracket here you can pop around in other locations as we mentioned there is also velcro straps with these cable channels these plasticable channels that i think i first saw these plastic channels being used on like nzxt cases and then other brands have started to use them um i am on the fence about them i feel like they often for me get in the way more than they actually help what would be helpful is if i don't know how manufacturers would do this but if they were just like if these were modular and you can move you could move them stick them anywhere you wanted because sometimes when i'm trying to route cables these won't be in the perfect position that i need them to be in so they'll be like a little too high or too low which you know forces me to go up and around or it's just it's just a pain it could be a pain in me so what i would suggest to manufacturers is you can keep this design but make it more flexible instead of just having them fixed in these positions i don't know if you could just like you know move them move them wherever you want you'd have to have like a grid of holes and stuff on the motherboard tray but your motherboard would be covering it up anyway so theoretically it's possible um but uh that's just that's just how i feel about them that being said the velcro straps do seem pretty sturdy they're not super cheap or anything up top you may have noticed we've got a fan controller here so there's actually one two three four five six three pin fan headers right there and then you've got three four pin pwm fan headers and then of course we've got sata power thank god it's not molex so that's that's going to power it and then you've got one more cable uh that's going to connect to your motherboard a a system fan header on yamobo and uh and that's pretty sweet so we can actually wire up some of our fans uh to this this controller today that'll be handy we also have this thing this kind of weird is this on the define seven if it was i don't remember i actually didn't even do a defined seven review so that's probably why i'm not sure but there's this weird thing it's just a cable cover i don't know why it doesn't make too much sense to me because this side panel isn't glass it's just a regular well you can't see it over there but it's just a regular side panel you can't see through it so why is this necessary i don't know is this just for like really really anal people who just need to know that every single cable is tucked away as best as possible i'm not sure i probably won't use it i think it's i kind of think it's annoying but here's a look at our drive cage two trays right there these are the same trays i believe as uh that's not it as these ones so you've got four of these you got six in total two of them are pre-installed at this cage which can be removed completely or you can slide it over to the right or left depending on how much clearance you want for radiators your power supply a drive right here in the middle on a multi-bracket and stuff like that uh let's install the psu i think we pretty much covered the back here oh one thing i forgot to mention about the top fill port if you want to add a fill port there's a little cut out there so it just makes hopping off your loop or just filling it completely much easier all right power supply time all right 20ish minutes later i have finished all the cable management on this side of the case and i gotta say it's uh it's working pretty good it's working for me i think the meshify 2 here does a pretty good job of cutting all the cables there's lots of tie-down points well velcro straps i should say there's no actual tie-down points in the traditional sense but you do have velcro straps and this is kind of what i was talking about earlier how sometimes these things aren't optimally placed for example this this connector is obviously not going to be able to fit in these channels so i kind of had to just detour it around it um otherwise uh if it went on top the side panel wouldn't uh close it would just be popping out too much so it's stuff like that like if i could have just shifted this like put these on rails you know ooh that's a good idea all you casemakers are getting these free ideas golden ideas just just put them on rails so that we can just slide them wherever we want and then even even better if we could even articulate them counterclockwise or clockwise if you could like rotate them a little bit because like i could have i could have probably used a little bit of rotation on this one like i would have put this one a little higher maybe rotated it like 30 degrees just because this is kind of coming at an angle like just that level of granularity would be would be nice to see because i feel like cable management on cases has pretty much gone unchanged for a long time there hasn't really been a lot of innovation there these channels were a cool idea at first and now i think it's time that we move them forward in some ways so uh but apart from that plenty of space underneath the power supply shroud for all of your excess cables so that just makes things so much easier and tidy not not necessarily tidy down here but it makes the rest of it look really nice and you can just kind of tell it looks fairly clean back here despite having what five connected rgb fans like there's just and there's two wires coming off of each of those fans so we got 10 fan cables uh you know a bunch of rgb stuff and still we managed to to clean it up nicely doesn't look super cluttered or anything i did have to spend a little bit of time but a little bit of time goes a long way and we are pretty much ready for the last component of the build which is our graphics card this bad boy out of here this is the msi rtx 3070 gaming x trio and it is lovely it is absolutely beautiful it's a really attractive card if you guys remember i also bet my rtx 3080 gaming x trio on a game of beer pong with my cousin and agreed to give it to him in full if he beat me at the game so if you haven't watched that video yet i'm just gonna shamelessly plug it because it's an awesome video go check it out um but uh why don't we go ahead and install this guy before we do i wanted to point out a couple things about the graphics card area and stuff okay i'm gonna have one really buff arm and one super weak arm all right so um what i was gonna say here is that you have one two three four five six seven expansion slots going horizontally and then you also have two more vertical so you can actually mount this mount gpus vertically in this case although you will need to buy a sold separately adapter bracket uh riser cable is what is the word i'm looking for riser cable ribbon cable whatever uh that's gonna need to be purchased separately and that will allow you to boot mount your gpu just like that now depending on your graphics card it is going to get those fans a little bit closer to that tempered glass side panel than than you're probably comfortable with but don't fear there's also this fractal design now makes their own vertical riser bracket cable mod has one very similar to this uh but basically what this does is it pretty much fills all of your horizontal expansion slots and puts the uh the actual pcie slot right smack more or less right smack in the middle of your case so it does push the graphics card back a little bit oh these tubes are in the way it does push the graphics card back further into your case so that your fans aren't pressed up against the panel your side panel um which is obviously uh not good so uh we're not going to use that we're just going to install it horizontally um i don't want to deal i don't want to open another box i'm ready for this build to be done as fun as it is i just want to see it in action so we're going to go ahead and mount this guy and bear in mind we have plenty of clearance for giant graphics cards in the case's current configuration but if we wanted to install a bunch of drives and we wanted to pop this panel and bring it to the front and have a bunch of drive trays that would significantly reduce the amount of gpu clearance you have and i don't think this gpu would actually make it it's not not quite not quite gonna fit there but uh without it you know in the current configuration you've got room for days i can't imagine there's a modern day gpu that wouldn't fit in the case and its current configuration even with uh radiator and vans the front so let's go ahead and get this installed and finish off this build all right the build's done and it's looking good but before i show you the inside of it i wanted to configure all of the leds to be pink first um i don't want you to see all the unicorn vomit shameful but before i can do that i need to obviously boot the system get into windows and change all the settings there but i can't do that because this motherboard needs a bios update in order for it to support the zen3 ryzen 5000 series processor so thank the lords of asus that they included a bios flashback feature on this board otherwise i would have had to swap out the cpu for an older generation chip and then i would have had to do the bios update that way so this is saving me a ton of time all i got to do now is go to the product page click on support this is a quick little mini tutorial i suppose and then uh just update your bios bios and forever there it is and uh oh there's nothing here oh god no don't tell me the bios isn't here or ready hold on hold on fresh oh god oh thank god okay so if your bios isn't showing up on an asus product page at a support page just hit f5 and that seems to fix it so here we go here we go this is the one that you want this is a gasa a gasa adjacent whatever uh e or what is it 1.1.0.0 i think it needs to be that or newer in order for it to add support for zen3 so i'm going to go ahead and download that and we should be bios flashbacking in just a bit all right into the port you go and i think we just hold this down oh i see a light see you light blinking that means it's working i think okay we'll be right back hopefully it works all right the light turned off so i think it finished let's try it out it goes nothing please give me a sign oh come on come on come on come on this isn't looking good fans are definitely working oh yeah oh yeah oh oh yeah oh yeah all right cool all right so uh it looks like we'll be able to get into windows just fine at this point and we'll circle back once all the leds are configured it should look pretty sweet oh there it goes it's going it's going okay all right so i tried configuring the rgb lights to be all pink because that's you know the theme i was going for and then i was just reminded how freaking garbage rgb is in in pcs like the pc implementation for rgb is still hot garbage i tried for like an hour guys to get everything pink which sounds like such an easy thing to do it should be a simple task but it was not and i'm just going to show you the build in all of its unicorn vomit glory because i gave up on trying to make it all pink i'll briefly explain what what i was going through but you've heard it all before you've heard it all before when you have like conflicting brands like different brands you know it's not all cohesive it's all spread out you've got different applications that you have to use for each component and that can cause conflicts and sometimes things just don't work it's all funky it's all mess it's all a mess so i have like corsair iq that was the only application that was somewhat working that was working for the uh for the ddr4 memory there and then i had asus aura sync which is now apparently integrated with the armory crate thing which is stupid i always try to avoid installing that and then i actually had to that didn't even friggin work so like the the aio the fractal aio and the fans well the fans are connected to the actual uh fan in rgb hub that's integrated with the radiator and then there's a cable that goes from the the water block all the way to the uh five volt addressable rgb header on the motherboard so it's an asus motherboard you'd think okay asus or sync just tell that header to change colors that didn't work nothing worked nothing it didn't like there was no response whatsoever so i don't know i don't know i you know i tend to think like oh it's user error i'm just messing up i'm an idiot which is true but no this time like it just wasn't working nothing was working dragon center msi dragon center useless i didn't even see a lighting section there was no lighting area i tried to download mystic light that didn't work so i don't know if they just don't have support yet for rtx 30 series or what but i wasn't getting anywhere so i gave up and here's the build i don't know why i'm so angry i i know i am angry but i shouldn't be at the same time because it still turned out to be a very nice looking lovely pc uh and you can definitely see all the lighting right through the front panel there i did remove the front dust filter so you can see the lighting a bit better and it's getting more airflow and there's definitely air moving through the system it feels feels pretty cool in here i mean it's definitely a little bit warmer now but we have far cry 5 writing up more on that in a sec but um yeah i just want to quickly say that this is a really really awesome case you know i feel conflicted about at the same time because it's more or less a defined seven with a couple tweaks right it's not exactly defined seven but a lot of similarities a lot of the same dna which is good in a way because you know if it's not broken don't fix it but at a certain point you kind of want to see a company change things up a little bit and i think we've been wanting that from fractal for a long time they did that with the defined seven so that was good that was a real leap forward i think but now it's like they're just kind of copying that same layout with their other cases like the meshify 2. so i think they have a little bit of time they can still rehash it a few more times since the define 7's fairly new but at some point i don't want them to keep this layout for as long as they did with the previous defined series right they just kept rehashing it beating the dead horse so uh but that said it's still a really lovely case it's it's very premium quite high-end definitely a lot more uh features and flexibility than your og meshfy that's for sure and uh cable management not too shabby you know i didn't spend a whole lot of time but it looks fairly tidy so that's good i'm still not a huge fan of these plastic channels i'll have to do something about that but uh just tons of mounting support for radiators and drives um so you know really depending on what you want to do this thing can handle more or less anything you throw at it there were a couple nitpicky things that i had here and there about the case you know it's no case it's perfect but overall nothing was a deal breaker and i'd say that uh if you're in the market for a fairly premium case with lots of airflow this is uh definitely worth your consideration but before i sign off i just wanted to quickly show you guys a little demo here far cry 5. we are at 2560 by 1440 ultra settings completely maxed out graphically and fraps counters a little small but you can see we're getting around 130 140 fps yeah that's what an rtx 3070 and a zen 3 processor will get you right now so pretty awesome pretty awesome performance honestly it's uh very impressive let me go ahead and switch it over to 4k just for shiz and giggles and we are still getting a very respectable 70 80 fps yes well above 60. running at 4k max settings and a triple-a title oh this is nice oh it's so nice the only thing that could make it nicer is if the lights were pink but can't have everything i guess but thank you guys so much for watching this video if you enjoyed it toss a look before you go and get subscribed more tech content on the way we've got a lot more coming soon some fun projects coming right up so stay tuned for that guys thank you so much for watching have a good one and i'll see y'all in the next video\n"