Fractal Define R6 Review

Up Close:  Interior

Fractal market this case as “Two cases in one”, and the reason for that is best exemplified in this first image.  If you’re the sort that wants lots of HDDs, but doesn’t necessarily want then on show, making the interior look ugly, then the R6 is an excellent choice, as its large baffle blocks all view of the first 180mm of the case.  Aside from that, we have the usual excellent Fractal cable management options, with grommeted ports down the side of the motherboard area, as well as above and below on the false floor. 

 

 

Peering behind the baffle we can see that there are four 3.5″/2.5″ drive trays.  There are in fact, another two lower down, totaling six.  These six drive trays can actually be located into pretty much any combination of 12 positions, so that you can arrange them strategically around your cooling needs. 

 

 

The base of the R6 has the now common place false floor, however, this only extends as far forward as the baffle we were talking about earlier.  If you’re intending to keep the baffle in place, this isn’t really an issue, but if you’re removing it to relocate the HDDs and to fit a large radiator then you’re going to be facing a large hole.  We were thinking that it would have been a good idea to have a cover plate for this area, although thinking about it though, the only real reason you would remove the baffle is to put in a large rad, in which case you’d need to be going below decks anyway.  The only scenario where it might be an issue is if you put in a 240 or 280mm rad and removed the baffle to enable them to be viewed.  According to the instruction book, you can also mount 2×2.5″ drives on the upper surface of the false floor, but if we’re honest, it’s not immediately clear how this comes about.

 

 

The rear interior is a pretty standard ATX arrangement, with a nice 140mm Fractal fan on extract duty.  As noted when we looked at the exterior, there’s a mount for a double width GPU here in addition to the seven standard expansion slots. 

 

 

From the interior, it’s not really that easy to see what’s going on up in the roof.  It does though look like there are two sets of slotted mounts for both 120mm and 140mm based fans and rads.