 Hot Spot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of something that we saw for the first time at Computex. This is the fractal design Arc Mini, not to be confused with the Arc Midi, Arc Mini R2. So this is an MATX case that is designed to be extremely compact and accept a metric butt ton of cooling gear and hard drives, but not necessarily at the same time. So in terms of the packing material, we've got a hard foam, which is never particularly impressive, but I don't really mind it as much with smaller cases because they tend to weigh less and are therefore less likely to damage the foam in transit due to their weight. Although you can see that this piece barely made it. So you can see there's a thing. This is why I don't like hard foam. Soft foam wouldn't have had that problem. Next up, we've got the user's manual, which we are going to promptly throw away because I have a reviewer's guide, haha, which is just as good as a user's manual, if not better. Next up, we've got the plastic sheathing that covers it and in theory keeps it safe in transit. And that got boring. So let's pick up on the actual case. So starting on the outside, we have that typical clean Swedish design that we get from Fractal Design, which incidentally happens to be a Sweden based company. So on the front, we find two five and a quarter inch bays. Although the use of these is incredibly optional, as you're going to find out once we open it up. We have this piece of plastic that holds this front panel in place as well as the removable fan filter that is to be cleaned by running water over it. You know, when you clean it anyway, so it's got foam. Okay, anyway, there's two 120 millimeter fans of which one of them is included. So that's their silent are two series fans. And I actually really like this implementation here with a nice heavy fan filter. It feels very robust, got a nice little Fractal Design logo here. And then just a simple front that is very, very clean, very, very simple. And all you got to do is put in a couple of screws to install a fan and you are done on the top. We find the usual suspects in terms of I.O. We've got a reset switch, a microphone port, a headphone jack, a power switch with a power LED, as well as two USB 3.0 ports and an integrated fan controller. Five, seven and twelve volts are all supported. The right hand side of the case is completely plain, as we'd expect from Fractal Design. And the left hand side of the case has a nice smoked window that I've removed the outside layer of plastic off of, but not the inside layer. At the back of the case, we find another 120 millimeter fan slot. There's actually a total of seven possible fan slots, I.O. and a four plus one arrangement for I.O. I would have preferred to have that fifth one below it, but it would have made the case that much taller. So I understand why they did this the way they did. You can put things like fan speed controllers and stuff here. You've got a little padded bottom power supply mount that also has padding on the bottom here. And then at the top, just like on previous Arc series cases, I wouldn't have been funny if that slipped and fell. All right, let's go ahead and do that. You've got another removable, cleanable fan filter that comes off the entire top of the case. And this serves a couple of purposes. Number one is functional. Number two is aesthetic because they've used an offset configuration for the top fan holes. So you can see you can mount either a triple 120 millimeter radiator. And yes, it supports a thick triple 120 millimeter radiator because of the way that it's offset. So the motherboard is actually over here. So as long as you don't have any tall components, it can sit right over top of the motherboard. Or it can support a dual 140 millimeter radiator in the top. And it doesn't really matter because of the gaps here. So you can see that because there's a lot of space here. It doesn't matter what the spacing of your radiator happens to be. I did miss one thing about the outside. I'm sorry. There was another fan filter down here on the bottom. Not my favorite implementation because it is a longer fan filter, but it serves its purpose fairly effectively. So it does allow filtration of both the power supply intake, which is isolated from the rest of the system's airflow, as well as this bottom 120 millimeter fan mount that could also be equipped with a radiator. So let's go ahead and pull the side panel off. I like smoked side panels. I think they look good. It's, you know, your typical fractal design solid build quality as far as the side panel is concerned. Not an excessive amount of flex by any stretch. So I'll just give you guys a little demo of that. Considering the fact that most of the side panel is a window, that's what I'd consider to be acceptable. And it also has some weight to it, which isn't always the case these days. So inside, this is where things start to get really interesting. So I showed you how that radiator support worked up there. You can do, see the way that the five and a quarter inch bay is cut out here and the way that it's screwed in. You can do the dual 140s without actually removing the five and a quarter inch bays. But if you want to, you know, step up to the big leagues and you want to move up to a 360 millimeter radiator, you will have to pull out your five and a quarter inch bays. But the good news is that you can. You can also take out your three and a half inch bays. So you can see right here that those front 120 millimeter fans have easy access to be screwed into radiators. So I can show you guys how the three and a half inch bays are removed. So you can mount, as I said before, up to six three and a half inch drives. And those will go on these sleds right here, which have the usual fractal design vibration reducing rubber grommets. Go ahead, pop that out. In fact, you can actually mount these different ways as well. So if you want to get a little bit more airflow to your graphics card from that front fan, obviously more air is going to be able to make it through this guy this way, especially if you don't have hard drives in there versus this way. Or you can pull the whole thing out entirely and then just have free flowing air going straight to your graphics card if you only need a few fans. If you do want to pull that one out, you actually just flip it over on the bottom. I love construction of cases that is done with screws versus rivets because it gives you the flexibility to do what you want to do with it. It is more expensive to implement this. Like, let's be let's be real clear. Every cent counts when it comes to case manufacturing. But I like it when case manufacturers spend that extra little bit to give us threaded holes and screws rather than rivets. So there you go. That's what it looks like. Oh, OK, we got to pull out another couple of screws on the back because I guess they're fractal. They wanted it to be, you know, Swedishly designed. So you can see this one has quite a bit less flex than the window one. Swedish designed and, you know, very solid and all that stuff. I remember their old cases never used to have quite that much care given to the solidity, particularly in shipping. I remember the Define R2 had a couple of issues with that hard drive cage. It wasn't reinforced enough. And I didn't realize that when I did my original video. It wasn't until I ordered a container of them at NCIX and some of them started getting damaged, particularly when we shipped them with a bunch of hard drives in them in pre-built systems. So there you go, guys. Take things very seriously when I talk about the packaging of products because I actually do know. All right. So there you go. There's that cage out. So that gives us some idea of just how open the inside can be. So you pull this bad boy out. You put a thick rad here, thick double rad here, thick triple rad up here. You can put another single 120 down here. You throw a single 120 in the back. They've actually got adequate spacing here for radiators that are slightly wider than a fan. And you have a very capable water cooling extravaganza of a case on a fairly reasonable budget. So I'm impressed with this. Now, in terms of the standard case features, it's MATX, as I mentioned before. There's your four expansion slots that use the standard screws, thumb screws for those. It's got all black internal cables, which is nice to see. And you can also see here. Sorry, I want to give you a better view of that. You can see here that they come pre-wired through the included cable management grommets that Corsair made so popular with the release of the 800D. And then on the back, we find two more SSD mounts. And the way they've implemented this is much better than the way they used to do SSD mounts on the back of motherboard trays. So they are actually removable using two screws here, here and here. Well, here, here, here and here. And then you just mount the SSDs using the mounting holes here and pull them off and mount them as you see fit. The way it used to be was they were holes that pass through the motherboard tray. You actually had to remove your motherboard in order to mount SSDs on their cases. So that was a little bit ridiculous. There's ample cable management room in the back of the case. So there's enough for a 24 pin connector, but not a whole lot more. I wouldn't expect to be passing anything over it. And you've got a CPU cutout tray or cutout in the motherboard tray just the way that you'd expect on any modern case. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Fractal Design Arc Mini R2, which is not the Arc MIDI R2. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment if you think that Josh is just one hell of a stud.