 This video is brought to you by the Intel Core i5 4670K unlocked processor. Add an Intel 520 series SSD to your Haswell system for unbelievable overall performance. Welcome to an impromptu unboxing that involves my hobo stabbing knife. We're testing the puncture resistance of the packaging here. So it's not very puncture resistant, but what it is is well padded. So this is the fractal design Define R4, which is a silence optimized case and is pretty similar to the previous generation Define R3 and the even older generation than that Define R2. Other than that it has been updated with some more modern features. So we are actually using this case for a build guide, which is why we have to have one and why we have to open it, but I realized we've never actually done an unboxing of this case before, so I figured we better do that. That's why we have our camera mounted on a tripod and our microphone hanging on a boom pole above me and sort of all these unusual things for unboxings. So you can see it has ample packing materials around it, which is the reason why my knife was not able to penetrate all the way to the case itself through the box. It does use a hard foam as opposed to a soft foam, which isn't really my favorite, but as long as it's nice and thick and you can see ours arrived in one piece, then I'm not going to worry too too much about it. So pretty much the main difference between the Define R4 and the Define R3 is going to be on the internals. The R4 is a little bit wider than the R3, so it has a bit of a boxy look and a bit of a wider stance than most cases. It's quite noticeable in person, although pictures don't really do it justice. So as long as you're not one of those people who has a very precise place to put the computer, then you don't have to worry too much about the extra width. What the extra width also does is it gives you better compatibility for things like taller CPU coolers and some more cable management room behind the motherboard and all that. There's a manual and that leads us to the front of the chassis. So the front of the case looks pretty much like a Define R3 or a Define R2. We've got an LED logo up here as well as a front door that swings in one direction or the other. I guess we'll have to figure out which. There we go. That swings open to reveal some sound dampening foam right here as well as two 5.25 inch bays that can be removed toollessly, a little bit of something like that. A built-in fan controller that gives you options from 12 volts to 7 volts to 5 volts with an integrated switch, which I personally like. I think it's better than the dial. At least I know exactly what I'm doing with my fans. And last but not least, a removable front cover. Oh, it's not removable. It's on a hinge now. Look at that. Okay. Well, that's different. As well as two front 140 millimeter fan mounts and a, this piece is removable, removable filter that allows me to not only remove the filter itself. Oh, this is cool. Check this out. Here I am. I've decided to use this case for a build guide. Never actually built in it because I just know the R3 is awesome and I figure this must be more of the same. But that gives us access to our two front 140 millimeter fans as well as the filter, which looks like it just slides off, which is pretty cool. Now, there we go. So that just comes off like that. You can clean that, put it back. You can replace the fans and all of this is completely tool-less because the fans just clip in just like this. There we are. All right. So we're just going to leave that out for now, for the sake of going more quickly. So we can go ahead and put that back in place. You were able to see the hard drive cages there before, but let's go ahead and start with the front IO. So you've got your front power button, a front reset button, two front USB three ports, two front USB two ports, microphone and headphone jacks. You've got two 140 millimeter fan mounts here in the top of the case with their trademarked moduvent design. So you can see, you can't even see through those, but what you do is you actually remove the covers and then you can replace them with fans should you see fit. On the other side of the case, you find it is completely plain, nothing out of the ordinary there. And then moving around to the back, you find another 140 millimeter fan with a 120 millimeter option, seven PCI expansion slots with an auxiliary one over here for mounting things like, I mean, the old R2 and R3 had a little fan controller that mounted there, for example. So there's a few things like cathode switches and stuff like that, that you can mount there. A bottom mounted power supply with noise dampening foam on the inside of it. And now it is time to open up the case. So there are thumb screws on the back, which, oh wow, contrary to what I normally see with cases, they are not too tight for me to remove them by hand. A lot of the time they're thumb screws, but they're so tight, you have to get a screwdriver to open them up the first time anyway, unless you have like, you know, huge forearms, which I don't have. This is the side panel windowed version of the Define R4, which is awesome. I'm so glad they started doing a windowed version of this case. You can get a non-windowed version, and in fact, you can get the case in a variety of different colors, but black window, or white, okay, the white one's really nice too, but black window for me was pretty much the way to go. I really, really wanted that window and that black thing. So there we have it. Here's the protective covers for these, which are important, because you could see one of them had a nice big scratch on it, but the window itself is crystal clear. These are the interns trying to get out of here without getting in the way of the camera. Good work, sir. All right, inside we find the inside of the case. So there's your two five and a quarter inch bays, not tool-less, which is interesting. Many cases these days have tool-less five and a quarters. Personally, I don't know how much it matters, because the last time I mounted something in a five and a quarter inch bay was a while ago. But there you have it. Then you've got five hard drive cages. So those are three and a half inch or two and a half inch hard drive cages up here at the top. These are removable and rotatable, and these ones have tight thumb screws. So I'll have to grab a screwdriver. All right, so I grabbed the screwdriver. Oh boy, and I dropped a screw. That's okay. So I grabbed a screwdriver so I could show you guys how this works. So not only can you remove this cage in order to give yourself more airflow for your graphics card or your CPU area or whatever else from here in the front of the case. So the air is really being drawn in through these vents in the side. That's what gives the DefiNR 4 its sound dampening properties, because you've got that foam in the front and then the sound is deflected away from the user that way. But you can also rotate them, and this is cool because it allows you to... If you know that you're not going to be using a ton of drives or if you don't mind having the cables for your drives come out the back of the cages here, which doesn't look as nice from a cabling perspective, you can mount it this way, which has the advantage of, see that? Better airflow and giving you the option to still mount some drives in here. Because this blocks most of the airflow, meaning you have to use really pressure optimized fans and even then you're not going to get much air through them. So this just gives you that flexibility. The bottom cage doesn't rotate unfortunately, but it shouldn't really need to because you don't have to... You know, you don't really have to get much airflow over to the power supply area itself. Speaking of the power supply area, you've got a... Here we go. Filter on the bottom of the case that covers not only the power supply, but also the bottom mounted 120 millimeter or 140 millimeter mounting point. You know what? I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it though. This fan mount down here on a case, like I really think that's pretty rare. Cable management wise, you've got your usual slew of cable management holes, including rubber grommets down here by the power supply, grommets up here where you're going to bring in your graphics card connectors, up here where you're going to bring up connectors to your optical drives, here where you might run connectors to wherever it is you'd run connectors up here, and here where your eight pin power will likely be located. You've got a nice large CPU cutout as well as another included 140 millimeter fan. And I did talk about there being more room for cable management in this case due to its wider stance. So let's go ahead and take that off. There we go. You can see more noise dampening material here. So there's... That is going to be helping this case be noise resistant. And lots of cable management rooms. So you've got a good, looks like about an inch or so, of cable management room behind the motherboard tray here where you can easily run a 24 pin connector as well as some well laid out little strap points so that you can keep your cables pinned down so that you'll actually be able to close that side panel when you are done with it. I believe they've also got... Do they still have SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray? Only one way to find out. Grab an SSD and see if anything lines up because that was a feature that they had on... Yeah, there we go. Two SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray right there and there. And I think that pretty much wraps it up. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Define R4 from Fractal Design. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And I... Oh yeah, mod events. There they are.