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Fractal Define R4 Mid Tower Case Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by leeghoofd @ 2013-01-07

Swedish Company Fractal Design is renown for their sleek enclosures. In typical Scandinavian style their product range can best be described as: A minimalistic yet striking design, where less is more. Quality, functionality and pricing go hand in hand. Today we introduce one of their latest creations: The Fractal Design Define R4 enclosure. A mid tower case with main focus on silent operation, yet no compromises are made on configurability and functionality as the review will highlight. The Define R4 is the successor of the older R3 design. Now sporting two Silent 140mm iso 120mm version fans, improved cable management, two extra USB3.0 front panel ports and a more flexible design regarding big CPU coolers and ultra long power supplies and graphics cards. Let's unpack Fractal's latest creation.

Test Setup

The Fractal cases are targeting the "I want no noise" crowd, thus Madshrimps opted to install a single GTX 480 GPU in stead of the regular two we usually use when reviewing gaming enclosures. For the cooling tests the case is equipped with the brand new Corsair H80i Hydro cooler, running at the balanced preset in the Link Software. The hardware comprises of the following parts:

ASUS Sabretooth X79 mainboard
Intel i7-3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz 1.37Vcore
Corsair Hydro80i cooling (balanced fan setting)
16Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ 2133C9 RAMs
1 x GTX480 Fermi graphic cards
2 x Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green Hard Drives
1 x Intel 520 240GB SSD
Corsair HX1000 Power Supply.

For the idle tests we let the setup warm up during a 30 min period. The temperatures of the CPU cores are monitored by the Realtemp software. The temperatures of the motherboard components are read out by the ASUS Thermal Radar software. For the stress test we go flat out and test our the six cores of the overclocked i7-3960X CPU (4500MHz) with the Prime95 64bit software with a custom 12-12K setting.

Here are some screenshots of the ASUS Thermal Radar software in action:

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