Fractal Define R6 Review

The Build

With the R6 stripped down to its underpants, building into it is simplicity itself.  With a standard ATX board, there’s plenty of room, especially with all the baffles, bells and whistles removed.  As you can see, we’ve made use of the vertical GPU mount, and, for a few quid extra, the flex PCI adapter.  What really calls out to us though is the sheer massiveness of the space up front for monster radage.

  

 

There may be some mighty wonderful things going on in the whole general mish-mash of case appreciation, but that’s not to say that when we get down to the nitty gritty, there aren’t some important little areas of attention to detail.  One of these little areas is the nicely grommeted cable management hole just underneath the front I/O and USB/SATA area of the Motherboard. 

  

 

As we said earlier, there’s a fair bit of space to be had up front.  In fact, getting as tape measure on it reveals that there’s actually 175mm of room between the inside edge of the case and the beginning of the Motherboard tray area.  Now, with fat rads in mind, we defy you to find a push pull combination that would exceed this requirement.

  

 

OK, so a 360 in the roof…That’s no big deal right?  Well actually it is.  We can count on one hand the number of decent cases that can take a 360 in the roof.  But what if we told you the R6 could also take a 420 in the roof?  Yeah, us to!!!  As you might imagine there are a few caveats to that, not least of which is that there mustn’t be anything higher than 36mm on the Motherboard in the respective area.

  

 

Even if you fit a 360, things are fairly tight.  here we can see that we have a maximum of 12mm between the rad and the edge of the RAM, and that’s assuming you want to take your rad out before you un-click your RAM.

 

 

Even with a medium thickness rad in the roof, you might want to think twice before going push pull, as you’re going to seriously encroach on your CPU and RAM area. 

 

 

If the above images have yo a little worried that the R6 isn’t the all round water cooling god we think it is, then you might want to dwell on what you can fit  in the front.  The answer of course, is pretty much anything you want.  With a good 175mm of space on offer we don’t think there’s a single rad you couldn’t put in there in a push pull configuration, and still not have it look too cramped.  If you’re worried about storage, then the panel that was removed from the front side earlier can actually be mounted in the vacant area on the motherboard side of the rad and offers the ability to mount 2×3.5″ HDDs in a stealth position.  Man, it’s almost like Fractal have really thought this case through.