Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “NEW! Fractal North XL Case Review”.
What we, what we I got here, is a nor fractal North XL, the north, but now with more XL at my LTT store custom Screwdriver from LTX, which does actually have a box opening bit. It’S so beautiful everybody’s. Coming to the comments now to complain about the base now mine comes with an accessory. Yours will not have, which is the Flex 2 pcie4 vertical GPU Mount sold separately mesh side panel. You can also get it with tempered glass. Don’T worry as we do.
Let’S take a look at the manual Builder’s guide, I love the Builder guide section of these manuals. Fractal does the best job of anybody in terms of the build guide, to give you some ideas, because you can get creative now last time, I would definitely recommend you check out the north review that I did uh cuz. I think I did a pretty good job with that, and also because I showed you could actually use a 280 mm radiator side mount in aide. This case is larger see this is the kind of good stuff in the manual. This is showing the placement of the 3 and 1/2 in Bay relative to the length of the power supply. This is good good info. It’S like with two 3 and 1 half inch Bays. You can have a maximum PSU length of 175 mm and still have 25 mm of clearance for the cables to bend out of there. If you opt for a single 3 and2 in Drive, you’ll have a maximum of 290 mm clearance, not including the 25mm cable Bend clearance radius thingy, it does support a rear 120/140 fan. It’S got hidden screw holes for that accessory fan bracket can be installed in the uh high and low position.
You can also install a rear 80 mm fan directly on the pcie slot covers that was uh. What Falcon Northwest did with their custom case, which I think worked really well on their Falcon Northwest workstation build? Now you can install 180 140 or 120 mm fans in the top. Did he say 180 mm fans in the top? Look.
What I just so happened to order cuz like the dynamic X2 180 mm. These are 150 CFM fans, 150 CFM at 1200 RPM. These are serious business. The fans that ship with this case, however, are 340 mm fans at the front. Now for water cooling options, it does have a dedicated fill Port, so you can mount a fill Port. You can put a 420 mm Radiator in the front up to a 40 mm thickness.
They recommend with a maximum overall length of 465 mm. You can, of course, do 280 or 360 in the front, as well as a 360 or 280 in the top, with just fans in the front. The graphics card maximum length is 413 mm. The bundled 140 mm fans do go up to 1,700 RPM, so that’ll move, pretty significant amount of air and the maximum CPU tower height is 185 mm. In terms of, I need a home for my high-end TRX, 50 or WR rx90 build or I picked up a WR rx80 platform on the secondary market for not a lot of money. This is a relatively compact case that will support all the Exotic and large size.
Motherboards, unlike the fractal meshify XL, however, it is seven rear slots. So seven rear slots mean that you’re not going to have a GPU hanging off of the end. But I feel like that’s kind of a niche use case.
And if you want that, you can get the fractal meshify XL, which is quite a bit longer and taller than this case. It does have official eatx motherboard support up to 330 mm, as well as ATX Micro, ATX, even Mini ITX in here. If you really wanted to that new 14900 ksss, that’s 800 watts and an ITX form factor, this would be the case that could deliver the cooling you need for that. I’M kidding I’m kidding just giving some folks a hard time. We’Ve got 400 watt thread rippers. We know how cooling is. We know how works with that.
The top is easily removable with a nice leather accent, strap. That’S our four mentioned. Fill port in the top. The front is easily removable for cleaning there’s a dust filter at the rear.
Here the dust filter’s got a couple of plastic snaps, it just pulls out and that’s all there is to it. This case is not designed for sound dampening, it’s not a knock against it. I’M just letting you know it’s going to be up to you to decide how you want to do noise Management in this. The White Version has nice silver, ACC sents.
You have analog headphone and microphone. Two USB 3, that’s 5 GB and one type-c 10 GB port. Behind the motherboard tray, You’ got fractal’s usual thoughtful additions and velcro straps for cable management. Two chases two sets of rubber grommets.
Also an integrated fan, control Hub or Fan pwm Hub. This Hub can be relocated to the rear. If you want to pull it out of the motherboard tray, that is an option, that’s in the manual, but I never do that now. One departure with this Fan Hub that you might not be used to is that it does not require an external input. It goes to a single four pin, connector that passes through pwm, but also pulls power. A lot of motherboard headers. These days will support. You know north of 30 Watts from a single fan, header, and so fractal is leaning into that to say hey.
That makes our Fan Hub a lot simpler, we’re basically just going straight from the motherboard into a breakout. We don’t need anything more complicated than that transistors or otherwise, and so you can have a uh lower cost Fan Hub. If you will in a platform like this for me personally, I definitely like the aesthetic, the fit and finish there’s a little bit of flex in the metal in the case and that sort of thing. But it’s overall, it’s a very sturdy case. There’S not really very much Flex in it at all. I think it’s a reasonable uh above average build quality for something like this.
This is certainly something that I wouldn’t mind. I mean if you’re building a WR rx90 system, you’re – probably spending 5 $ 10,000 on your computer. This would be a perfectly reasonable Chariot for those parts, power supply dust filter if you’re building a machine for machine learning around like the a800 and you’re using a bridge. So that you can have 80 gab of vram on a single platform with two gpus, because that exciting then yeah this platform will deliver.
All of that and more which is nice, reasonable, cooling, there’s definitely a lot to like about this platform. Your regularly scheduled build of the frackle north has been canceled, unfortunately spent thousands of dollars on thread Ripper Pro to do a comparison of thread, Ripper versus threader Pro tx50. The sticking point has been the motherboard. This WR rx90 uh doesn’t have a functional DM e slot. It’S actually, it is functioned a couple of times, but not reliably, and so I’ve narrowed down that there’s something funky going on with dim slot e on this motherboard.
So what do you? Do you pick up another one? I didn’t actually want to pick up another one. I went through asus’s support process, which we are at the time that I’m filming this exactly two weeks and two days into asus’s RMA, support and uh after buying memory, that was on the qvl and it’s still not working reliably. They said, okay, we’ll replace it, and I said great, can you send me the RMA info like where do I mail it? You got a label, or can we do an advanced replacement either or both? Let me know like go ahead and ship me a board.
I will ship you this one back and I get an email every other day that says: oh we’re still looking into it. We will escalate cuz, I said said: do you even have any of these in stock they’re out of stock everywhere? And they said that’s a good question and then I got into this infinite Loop of well. I don’t know so.
Instead of doing the Asus RMA thing, this thing it’s going back to the retailer. Sorry retailer I hate to do that. Cuz, it’s pretty hard on the retailer, like there’s, not a lot of profit margin in this kind of stuff and then, when you return something it’s like especially something that’s, you know $ 1,300.
It’S Madness, uh! Yes, I did take high resolution photos of the socket. There doesn’t appear to be any socket damage and I was able to do a side by side comparison of both boards to see what’s up and also compare it with the board. That’S in my Falcon Northwest rack system, which is working perfectly so yeah, I don’t know it turns out on the level one forms we got a lot of Builders building these systems and a Common Thread is people having memory trouble memory, training issues, probably down to needing A bios update a lot of error, z, d, sometimes error, ZD on post, sometimes error, z d. If you just leave the machine alone for a while, sometimes you’ll be using the machine, it’ll reboot and then it’s zero D and then you turn it off and back on and then it’s okay.
In my case, I narrowed that down to dim slot e, taking the memory out of dim slot e, no more Zero D errors perfectly stable on this board on this board. It just works: fine, like qvl, not qvl, all the the Kingston and uh uh G skill and Samsung memory that I have this board doesn’t care the manufacturing date on this. One is also January of 2024 and in fact the serial numbers on these two are really really close. This one came from Micro Center.
This one came from Newegg in California. I don’t know what to tell you. The fractal North XL would make a reasonable case for building with one of these, especially when we look at our Silverstone XE 360 sp5. This is an sp5 cooler that I bought with my own money for another video.
That’S Geno’s socket it’s a different socket, but it’s a replaceable mounting mechanism, and so I managed to uh get my hands on a different mounting mechanism for this cooler to use with thread Ripper Pro, because there’s not a Silverstone thread. Ripper Pro AO, but this AO performs exceedingly well with our epic, Genoa and Epic bargam Builds so ah we’re going to have to do another different, build and thousands and thousands of dollars apart, stay tuned for that, I’m this level one! I’M you find me level. One forms .