 Want a portable power bank, wireless AP, SD card and USB reader for your mobile devices? Check the link in the video description to learn more about the Adata Dash Drive Air AE400. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Fractal Design ArcMidi R2, which takes pretty much everything that was good about the original ArcMidi and, well, improves upon it. So what they were going for was not only an excellent air cooling case, which the ArcMidi was, in fact my wife's PC is still running in an ArcMidi, but they wanted to add flexible liquid cooling support to it as well because whether you're using an all-in-one or a completely custom loop, many of the kids today are adding water cooling to their systems. So in terms of the overall specs, we've got a pretty nondescript plain Jane Brown box, maximum airflow with a sleek and minimalistic front panel design. In fact, they haven't changed that much. Their front intake now includes an easy to clean dust filter. This was one of my complaints about the original Arc, was it just left kind of like horrible dust rings on it and there wasn't really a whole lot you could do about it. Front interface includes USB 3, which the old one did as well, top panel design for maximum airflow, which it was before as well, and the stylish windowed side panel made from acrylic allows you to see your components. That's their other way of saying that it has a window. Two separate hard drive cages can be moved around, individual hard drive cage feature vibration dampening rubber grommets and three high quality 140 millimeter silent fans and extensive water cooling support in the top panel and behind the front panel. So I'm not going to spend too much time opening the box. That my friends is how we do it. And we find a hard foam, which is not my favorite. I do like to see soft or closed cell foams, but I understand that from a cost savings perspective sometimes hard foams are a necessary evil from the manufacturing side. And as long as they're reasonably well designed, they can protect the case. So I'm just going to go ahead and see if I can pop that back in place. It looks like that came loose in shipping. Speaking of hard foam and hating it, at least they've gone for about an inch of thickness on the corners here. So I've definitely seen worse. Let's go ahead and open this bad boy up. So the first thing we're going to see, I guess, is the bottom of the case. This is unusual. We never do this. So it's got two different sizes of feet, large ones on the front of the case, small ones on the back, as well as a removable fan filter, which you can see, you can simply slide out like this. Not too long, which was a problem with older cases, particularly the Corsair 800D, where the fan filter on the bottom was enormous. So it meant that you had to slide it out that far in order to get it out, which meant you usually hit the wall or some other sort of obstacles. So this one is sort of like a dual 140 millimeter size. You've also got a little air intake here, so you'll get a little bit more airflow for the front. However, I don't think that's going to be a major factor in cooling for this case because most of it's going to be coming through the fairly open front mesh. Since the front panel is the part of the case that we're repairing here, we might as well show you how this front piece goes on. So this is what they meant by easy to remove and easy to clean. It's one solid piece of metal mesh with a sort of foam filter behind it that should allow air to pass through pretty easily, but will also provide very effective dust catching. You can probably take this whole thing and just kind of dip it in water and soap and wash it out. And you can see we've got one 140 millimeter fan included in the front, although there's room to mount an additional one. But what you'll also see here is a wide variety of different mounting holes. These will allow you to mount things like dual 120 millimeter radiators in the front of the case, which you might say, by the way, it goes in like this, click, which you might say, well Linus, how will you have room for that? I'll show you once we open it up. Two five and a quarter inch bays round out the clean front bezel that looks very similar to the original. There we go. Now that's clicked into place. On the top, we find once again, very, very open, open, free airflow. So that is the ARC concept as well as IO, including a reset switch that can't be accidentally pressed by a cat that jumps on your case, a microphone and headphone jack power, as well as a power indicator, LED two USB three ports, which is an improvement over the old one, which only had one as well as integrated fan control with five volts, seven volt and 12 volt switches. On this side, we find not a whole lot, just a plain side panel. And then on the other side, we find the windowed side panel that was alluded to in a very verbose fashion on the outside of the box. And it has a protective plastic cover that I actually don't seem to be able to remove. So the good news is your window will look as good as it does out of the box forever. The bad news is it looks like butt because there's air bubbles. I'm just kidding. I got it. Oh, I thought I had it. Oh, there's another one on the inside. Anyway, it's a bit of a frosted sort of, well, not frosted, it's a smoked, smoked panel. So it's going to look a little bit darker inside. It's up to the individual whether they prefer that or the clear side panel. But there you go. It has a bit of a bit of a different look to it. So on the back, we find another 140 millimeter included fan, although with optional mounts for 120 mil as well as seven PCI slots and then an additional auxiliary one where you can put something like a fan controller or whatever else. A bottom mounted power supply has noise dampening foam around it. So to give you guys some idea just how smoked that side panel is, I'm going to go ahead and remove the inside piece and you can look at me with or without the smoke. There you go. So it makes things a little bit darker. But if you have lighting effects inside your case, it's probably not going to affect things too much. But if you don't have lighting effects, then it will look significantly dimmer inside. Once we get inside the case, we find out how all of this is supposed to work. So up here in the top, there's that flexible radiator support. So there's another 140 millimeter fan included, but you can see there are a butt ton of different mounting points for different sized fans. So you could put up to a triple 120 millimeter radiator up here without any difficulty, but you would be sacrificing some of that five and a quarter inch expansion. Now in order to make this easier, all you have to do is remove two screws here in the back, one of which I have pre-loosened and the other one looks like it's going to be a problem for me. And then you can remove the entire top of the case just like you could on the V1 chassis. So there you have it. So here's dual 140 millimeter mounting points as well as triple 120 millimeter mounting points. You can actually put another 140 over here should you so desire, although I don't know that that's something that I would necessarily recommend sacrificing a five and a quarter inch bay for. Now in the front of the case, that's where things are also quite interesting because you can remove this top one so you can fit a reasonably long graphics card in here. In fact, anything that's on the market currently pretty much without removing it, but you can remove it to give you the option to install even longer graphics cards. In order to give yourself more options at the front of the case, you can also check this out, screws down here, remove the second hard drive cage, meaning that you can only mount, well, you can mount things creatively pretty much at that point. So you could go ahead and put SSDs on the back of the motherboard tray, more on that later, but you could also put nice thick radiators here in the front without any difficulty at all. More flexibility for the drive cages though, if you're one of those people who says, well, look at this guys, look at this in profile. Not much airflow can get through here and you don't mind having cables sticking out the back of your hard drive area. You can actually chuck this in this way instead of the default, which is sideways mounted. If I could figure out how to do it and that would be great. There we go. So now you get more free flowing airflow, especially if you're not installing all five drives in there. So Fractal Design is saying they have 26 millimeters of cable management space behind the motherboard tray. I believe it. So there's quite a lot of space. You can easily fit a 24 pin cable back here. They've also gone with what I really like to see, which is a much larger grommet down here at the bottom than the ones that are up here along the side, because most of the cables are going to have to come through here before they go up to the eight pin, which also has rubber grommets back there or the eight pin that's positioned where I hate having it positioned in the middle at the top. 24 pin PCI Express as well as anything that goes up here to your five and a quarter inch drive cages. On the back, we find the two and a half inch SSD mounts that I talked about before. These are very basic SSD mounts and you actually have to screw into the bottom of the SSDs from where the motherboard would sit. So it's not as elegant as Fractal's implementation of this feature on other cases and I'd really recommend just using Velcro or double sided tape or something to stick those on there. Also on the back of the case, we find the power as well as the splitter leads for the built in fan controller. So it uses a single Molex for power and then it also is able to control up to three fans using a simple voltage control and not providing any RPM monitoring. And so there's lots of room for cable management in the back, not as many cable tie loops as I'd like to see. So there's only a couple rows of them here and here. I like to see some cable tie loops leading up to the eight pin if I was to criticize something about the cable management in this case, which is of course what you people pay me good money to do. Internal hookups are, oh, all right, well I've moved them before apparently. I was ready to go with those at the front. Are the standard fair, so there's a USB 3 connector and it's sort of standard bulky form as well. Like to see this, check this out, a USB 2 connector. So you can't hook them both up at the same time, but this gives you the option to plug into USB 2 if your motherboard doesn't support USB 3 without a weird funky adapter. HD audio is included as well as your power switch, reset switch and hard drive LED and power LED. All of these are black cables, which is a definite plus. Last but not least, this is something I've been forgetting on a lot of cases lately. Let's go ahead and check out what they include in terms of accessories, but I'm going to go ahead and use my divining powers to predict screws. Okay, so nothing unexpected. Some screws, some cable ties and not a whole lot else, although they do include one of those handy dandy little adapters so that you can use your screwdriver to put in the, there they are, the motherboard standoffs. I do like those. Those are useful. Way to go, Fractal. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Don't forget to leave a comment on the video. Let me know what you thought. Like the video and share it with anyone who you think should buy this case, which is anyone who appreciates simple Swedish design and unlike IKEA, things that don't just immediately fall apart. I know that looking at what I've done to it here.