Fractal Design Define R3 Build Log

The Case: Fractal Design Define R3

Starting with the case, we went for the Fractal Design Define R3 because of the hard drive layout and its reputation for being a quiet case. We went with white purely for aesthetics and in our opinion, this is a visually understated but still feature rich case.

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This is the view from the front, straight out of the box with plastic film still over the door. (we might leave that on until the build is done just in case…)

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What’s behind door number 1? Doors 2 and 3… and a layer of sound proofing foam. In all seriousness, without an optical drive and having a power button on the top of the case at the front, we doubt there will be much need to open the front door at all.

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As you can see, the case comes with one front 120mm fan fitted as stock in the lower bay. We elected to take the other stock fan from the rear of the case and mount it in the front upper bay when preparing the case. The main reason for this was aesthetics, (which seems stupid on reflection as we won’t be opening the front door, let alone the inner ones).

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The sound proofing rubber material on the inside of the side panels and roof is actually bitumen (thanks Heili at Fractal for pointing out our mistake) and is much more dense and very different to the front door of the case. It gives the panels a solid heavy feeling. First things first – we need to look at where our cables are going to go and the configuration of our fans before we even look at any of the other components. 

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So we installed a Noctua 120mm fan in the back and moved the stock fan to the front, routing the cables into the gap behind the motherboard tray. It’s worth noting that this gap isn’t exactly huge and there is only one access hole along the top. To push any cables through this hole with a motherboard installed and a top mounted fan won’t be much fun but it’s possible.

We’d also like to note at this stage that the grommets are great but they are a little loose for our liking and we were often re-aligning them with the holes as our cables snagged them. Perhaps we were too rough with it but it’s one of the few things that we found less than perfect with the build quality.

 

The Power Supply: The Corsair HX-650

The Corsair HX-650 is a semi modular power supply with the 8pin and 24pin power cables fixed to the main unit. In previous builds, we have used it’s predecessor, the Corsair HX-620 and the mighty AX-850 which IS fully moduar.

The thing to remember is that you always need the motherboard power leads so it shouldn’t really matter if the power supply has these fixed or not, the only benefit we can see is routing these cables and making adjustments once all of the components are in. With Careful planning, you should be able to work around this and save some money with a cheaper semi modular power supply.

 

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