 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Fractal Design Define R4 Computer Case. As you can see, this case has a very ugly box, but I'm gonna hope that this is more of a story of the beauty within than a story of the beauty without. As you can see, the funny thing is that the whole... Oh, for crying out loud, give me a sec guys. Sorry about that guys. Had to fix the TV there. So you can see we have a fractal design logo on the TV behind me, which is of course appropriate for a fractal design case unboxing. Very appropriate indeed. There we go. Alright, so what is happening? What did they say about themselves on the... So they've done away with the silver case color, so it's available in black, white, and titanium. Supports ATX, micro ATX or mini ITX case, uh, motherboards. It's minimalistic, elegant, and that's something we've come to expect from the Define series. Patent pending mod event is something we've come to expect. So basically, what is this? This is an evolutionary change, not a revolutionary change. Fractal is going for just the Define R3 Plus, I guess. So they've updated the internals in a big way, but I'm not expecting the outside of the case to really look very different at all. Packing material wise, it's... I'd prefer to see a soft foam, but more and more we're seeing manufacturers go with hard foams because they do present a bit of a better value on the manufacturing side. So, well, they're going with them. Included is a user's manual, Define R4 computer case user's manual, very good stuff, as well as a plastic cover. So from the outside, sort of any immediate similarities that you might notice between the Define R4 and the Define R3 are obviously not present. You know, this doesn't look anything like a Define R3, which clearly didn't look anything like a Define R2, and of course I'm being very, sort of very, very ironic here. So it looks pretty much like a Define R3 from the outside. For front I.O., we've got our power indicator, we've got our microphone, headphone, and reset button. That's not a headphone button, that's a jack, but that's a button. Power button, did I mention that before with cool little concentric circle finish on it. USB 3 super speed ports, 2 USB 2, not super speed ports, 2 front panel 5 and a quarter inch bays, sound dampening material inside the front panel here. This is actually very important for sound dampening. Oh cool, built-in fan controller, 12 volt, 7 volt, 5 volt. Awesome, those are the only things you really need. Any fans that'll go all the way down to 5 volt, fantastic. The hydraulic bearing fans that are included should do it. There is a 140 in the back and a 140 in the front. They've updated this a little bit, so that's kind of interesting. So now, instead of being on a swinging door, this is actually, this actually swings down, does it? Hold on, I think it's, ah, there we go. Give me a sec guys. Okay, so yeah, we got, had a bit of a clearance issue there, but I just kind of tucked this in. So there's a removable fan filter right here, which sort of comes out somehow. Sure, like that. That's probably not how you do it. Dual 140 or 120 millimeter fans. These are, there are two fans with the hydraulic bearings that I mentioned before that are included and, so I talked about the filter already, talked about the, ah yes, so there's a grill here and then they also have access to air through the vents that are on the side. So you can go and have a look at that vent while I figure out how to get this filter back in place. I'm really sure this isn't how I'm supposed to do it, but I'm just kind of like bending it in. So if you do it my way, then sort of you're doing it wrong, but I'm trying to film an unboxing here and not, you know, paint the Mona Lisa. So maybe I don't do things the most elegant way. I'm very, very sorry. ModuVent. This is a cool technology. The first time I saw ModuVent was with the DefiNR 2 and basically, see these? These are fan holes, but there's like nothing that goes through them because there are actual pieces of sound dampening material that are screwed in. You can take these screws out, you can put a couple of 140 millimeter fans up there and it is off to the races. On the side you've got another ModuVent, so this one supports either a 120 or 140 millimeter fan directly over where your graphics cards would be if you had graphics cards in your system. In the back you see a 120 or 140 millimeter fan mount. Now more just general venting holes, seven PCI slots with one auxiliary one that you could use for like a fan controller or something like that. Bottom mounted power supply with sound dampening material. The DefiN series is all about quiet computing. So let's go ahead and get it opened up and I'll be right back. Now DefiNR 3 is a little on the heavy side for its size, so when you open it up you realize it's because they spent money on the sound dampening material. So the side panels are phenomenally heavy because they have this thick, dense material here that helps to deaden the noise that gets made inside your case. So that combined with the sound deadening material that's built into the front panel means that any sound usually gets kind of projected out the back or out those vents on the side and you're not as likely to hear it. They have seriously upgraded the cable management room in the DefiNR 4 compared to the DefiNR 3. There is enough room that you can easily route a 24-pin cable back here. Lots of cable management anchors so you won't have any difficulty routing things wherever you need them to go outside of the holes here. They've also put in a larger than usual bottom power supply cable grommet and what that means is that all the cables that need to come up here will actually be able to fit. I've seen cases that have ones that are only about this size so while you've got lots of room to cable manage up here there's not enough room to actually bring the cables up to the top of the case. The included fans have very nice, wow, very high quality sleeving on them. You can't even see the color of the wires at all. This has colored wires inside it guys. You can see up here but this looks... that's some of the tightest mesh I've seen from anything but like Murder Mod. It's fantastic. Okay and I think that pretty much does it for the backside. Your CPU cutout is here where you would expect to find it. On the other side of the CPU part of the motherboard tray and let's go ahead and open up this side. So here you can see the mod event. So this has like a sound dampening foam hoo-ha thing going on. You just go ahead and remove that and throw in a fan. If you feel the desire, very heavy as well just due to the to the sound dampening material, they have seriously upgraded the internals of the Define series as well. So we still have room for eight hard drives. See that? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. However, they've given the option to completely remove five of them if you don't want to mount a ton of drives and you want to create more room in your case for cooling and airflow. See that? Now those front 140 millimeter fans have lots of room to blow air from the vents here into the inside of the case and you've got room for much longer graphics card. So you could install a graphics card that's like... I mean come on. It would be an entire Linus forearm and almost a Linus hand in length by the time it actually touched this fan which seems to be on some kind of a... there we go. That's clipped in a little bit better now. Oh that explains it. So it looks like this came a little bit loose in shipping. You know what? Let's go ahead and do some Linus Tech Tips investigation of what's going on with that front mechanism thing that's been causing problems for me. Couldn't get the front closed. Okay so just pull this off and you can see that we get access to all of the pieces here. So this whole thing comes out. Look at that. So you just clip the fans in here. You can remove the fan filter much more easily now that I've done it sort of the way that you're supposed to. Then you take this whole mechanism, put it back inside here, run your cables around the back where there is tons of room. Here come around the other side. This is fantastic. So there's tons of room for cable management back here. Oh you can't reach can you? We're plugged in guys. Tons of room for cable management here and then you just go and take the whole thing and clip it right into place like that. So now it isn't going anywhere and we're not gonna have any more trouble with it. Awesome. Ah another thing they've upgraded about the interior. Check this out guys. Is that you can not only take this out and do this but you can take it out and do this. Haha. So you can rotate it. That gives you more airflow through here if you haven't filled it up with hard drives or even if you have it all likelihood because a lot of people complain about this style but in order to get enough strength once you fill this up with hard drives you have to have enough reinforcement material here but you can go ahead and put it in that way in order to reorient the drive cages however you see fit. Now the bottom one yep you can remove that one as well which is very very cool. So there's that bottom mounted 120 or 140 millimeter which has one long fan filter that can be taken out from the back. There we go. So that covers both this fan and the bottom of the power supply. You can see the cable management more clearly from here. You can also see the mod u vents that are in the top of the case. So what have they upgraded? Removable cages both this one and this one although this one doesn't look like you can reorient it. No I kind of doubt it although I could be wrong I hope I'm not wrong. Ah SSD mounts. Is that an SSD mount on the bottom? I don't know I don't know what this hole is for. Maybe you can reorient it. Whatever someone will look it up and they'll make it the top comment and someone will thumbs it up and then Linus will look stupid but he doesn't feel that bad about it so don't worry guys. Go ahead thumbs it up make it the top comment and we'll know if you can rotate that or not. You can rotate this one two five and a quarters. Alright right what have they upgraded? So the rotating cages the removable cages the actually much better design for the front fans and filters the integrated fan controller so there's a molex connector right here and then you've got a number it looks like three the number three four I don't know a number reset switch. You've got a number of fans that can be plugged into that in order to control most of the fans in your case which is very very cool. You've also got USB 3 natively USB 2 front audio these are all nicely black cables that'll go into your motherboard and look really sleek. So they've added right 140 millimeter fan support at the back I mean yeah so evolutionary changes little steps is this a better case than the Define R3? Absolutely. Was the Define R3 already a kick butt case? Absolutely. 100% kick butt in spite of the lack of motherboard tray. That's a cheap shot. Cable management as well as some rubber grommets for oh cool they include rubber grommets for the fans that's outstanding look at that lots of isolating our grommets and all of the screws that you need to assemble your case. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Define R4 from Fractal Design. Honestly Define R3 is one of my favorite cases so this only makes it better. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos and just in case you didn't already know it includes rubber isolating mounts for your three and a half inch drives and all of these sleds are fully two and a half inch drive compatible. Again don't forget to subscribe it's really important.