Embedded Files
We are big fans of Arctic products here at Eagle River Electronics. So when Arctic announced it would be making a new case for the first time in over a decade, we were very excited! Not only was this a great chance to support a company that we love - one who has supported us and sponsored our Christmas giveaway multiple times - but it was perfect timing as we were looking for a new higher-end case to use in our High End Gaming build. We have retired our previous build and wanted to put a new white build up front and center, and this was the perfect opportunity for that.
That makes it extra concerning when it looked like this thing had been shipped through a warzone! The outside of the box was dented, dinged, crunched, and torn up. See for yourself. But, despite outwards appearances, the case arrived unscathed! The box was double-layered thick, sturdy cardboard that would (and clearly did) protect the contents from rough handling, and the interior foam packaging was custom molded for this exact case. Even though it took a beating, it arrived in one piece with zero evidence of any shipping damage.
Opening it up, first impressions were great. The first look we got was a pristine undamaged PC case floating in about 2" all around of protective space. The styrofoam molding was cracked on one end, but kept it's shape more than well enough to survive shipping abuse. The case itself was wrapped in a thin plastic bag to prevent any scuffs or scratches from marring the paint during shipping. Inside, we can clearly (well, somewhat hazily) see that some elements are held on with paint safe tape. Even inside the case, they took extra steps to make sure that nothing would come loose or cause damage during shipping. Overall, 10/10 effort. This box shows the evidence of rough shipping and everything inside is perfect. The first notable thing about the case itself is that I ordered the VG (Vertical Graphics) version of this case. The only difference is that the VG version comes with the vertical graphics card mount. We were unsure how this would ship. It's a nice touch to have it shipped pre-installed.
When taking off the styrofoam packaging, you'll find the Accessories box nestled inside in a custom molded spot.
This accessories box is a bit better than others may give. The missing PCIe brackets, all 7 of them, are included in this box. Which is a nice touch often missed on cases with vertical brackets included. Besides that, it includes a full set of drive screws for HDDs or SSDs, with silicon vibration dampeners. It has a few extra standoffs for replacements or extended board support, a few extra cable ties, and more than enough M3 and 6-32 screws for all your needs. Interestingly, the 6-32 screws aren't the traditional hex head, but rather "cheese head" screws.
Getting to the case itself, it's very squared off in style. It's got sharper square edges all the way around. Where most cases try to have at least some softer, rounded edges somewhere, this is all sharp angles. The air vents on top, rear, and the back are all squares and even the PCIe brackets have perfectly square vents. They were definitely going for an intentional design choice with this one. And love it or hate it, you cannot deny they nailed what they were going for. This is a very unusual design in the custom PC market. That's neither good nor bad, just unique.
It's got a lot of sharp edges, clean lines, and a minimalist look. It's also notably larger than many cases on the market, being both taller and deeper than most of the competition. Right now the market is trending in two opposite directions, with one end going for more natural and graceful, incorporating things like gentle curves, wood accents, and a softer, more subtle look for a PC that can blend in on the desk of someone with trinket-maxing decor. And simultaneously there's a growing interest towards "cableless" designs, in which rear connect motherboards get support so that not a single cable can be seen in a final build.
This case eschews both of those, instead going instead for a modern, minimalist, big and bold look. It's up to the market to decide if this is a smart design decision, but it is certainly eye catching.
All the exterior elements of this case are incorporated into this squared aesthetic. The front panel, which consists of a power button with lighted ring around it, a combo headphone jack, one USB-C port, and two USB-A ports are each set into the first 5 squares on the top of the case. As far as panels are concerned, the top and back side panel have magnetic removable dust filters. Both of these come free easily by hand and can have an extra layer of square pattern that lines up perfectly with the exterior panels. Should make cleaning a breeze. Both the glass side panel and the back side panel are secured with one captive thumbscrew. The top is held on by friction snaps only. The front panel does not come off except by removing 6 screws. The rear and bottom are not removable.
First look inside the case is promising. There is more than enough room to build inside this case, and more than enough room for fresh air to flow through wherever it's needed. The graphics card bracket is pre-installed and the lighted Arctic logo in the front of the case is crisp. The 3x 140mm reverse bladed intake fans dominate the right side, while the 2x 120mm exhaust fans are on the back panel.
White is a hard color to get right. With metals, plastics, silicon, and more, all having slightly different white balances, it can look very bad, with some white elements looking yellow, grey, or blue, when compared to their neighbors. While it's virtually impossible to get a perfect white balance against so many materials, Arctic did it well and nothing is glaringly, badly mismatched. The cables for the pre-installed fans are routed cleanly, as well, and the interior is more than spacious enough to make building an easy task.
Moving along to the back, everything back here looks great! There is ample cable management options available, and the cables from all the pre-installed units (5x fans and 1x lighted logo) are routed to sensible places. As always with Arctic fans, they use standard PWM fan connectors and standard ARGB 5050 connectors. All the units in this case are daisy-chainable, making it easy to hook up properly even if your motherboard has limited connectivity.
One small gripe is that, despite being daisy-chainable, they were not pre-chained. It's a very small thing, but it's a touch of hands-on care that shows the team who assembled this computer took an extra few seconds to check things. It's no deal breaker, but unfortunate that it was missed. Nice touches like that show a lot in the customer experience.
Looking further down in the back of the case, we see an extra bracket. At first, we thought this was a mistake. This bracket is to install over the fan mounts to allow a 140mm fan mount to fit 120mm fans. Problem being, the bracket is already installed at the top. It comes configured for 120mm support, and you can remove that bracket at the top to support 140mm instead. Did they send us an extra bracket by mistake? No. After some investigation, it appears the extra included bracket is for the intake fans. So if you need or want to replace the 3x 140mm reverse bladed intake fans for any reason, you've got more options and versatility. That's an extra nice touch. Not the kind of thing you often see in builds that are designed around a certain fan profile. Behind that, the basement is completely enclosed and has support for extra long PSU and two bays for HDDs or SSDs. The case is advertised to support up to two 420mm radiators - one intake on the side and one exhaust on the top - and it certainly does that. But it also will support two 360mm radiators, or any combination thereof. The fan/radiator support is second to none!
This does lead us to a very minor concern, which is that this case only supports negative pressure environments. With 3 intake fans and up to 5 exhaust, the pressure differential will draw in extra dust at every other crack and crevice. Not a deal breaker, and you could always reverse the fans and have a non-standard layout at a minor cosmetic loss, but worth noting.
The bays are well designed. As far out of the way as they can be, easily removable with nothing but a single thumbscrew. If you want or need the extra room, it's a very simple matter to acquire it. The bays themselves are designed very well, with the rarely seen support for both 3.5" drives and 2.5" drives, standard, without the need for any adapters, with support for another 2.5" on top of that. Add to that the 3 that could be mounted to the back of the frame behind the motherboard tray and you've got support for 6 additional SATA drives.
But then we saw it. Nowhere in the basement has any ventilation. The entire bottom is completely solid, we picked up the case to double check. The walls are solid. The PSU is on little risers to allow some airflow, but that airflow has nowhere to come from. The only air it can get is by fighting with the side intake fans for overflow from the back side panel. Granted, the ventilation on this side panel is a bit wider than necessary to allow for this, but it's not a fight the PSU can easily win.
Arctic, please! Your PSUs need to breathe! You've got excellent airflow though the case. Everything in the main chassis, from the CPU and the GPU to the motherboard and the RAM, will get great airflow. No overheating on the major or minor things to worry about here. But the PSU? You've trapped it in a little metal box and effectively given it a straw to get all it's fresh air. And at the other end of that straw is three 140mm very powerful Arctic case fans doing their best to steal all the air from the other side of that straw. We were worried about this, but still had to build a PC in this case before we can gather evidence with a test more than a just a theory.
While we're here, building in this case is GREAT! Everything is very easy to do. Plenty of room in all the critical directions to work around everything. Plenty of room for connecting all cables to the components, more than enough cable routing options to manage your cables in many different ways. Optimally spaced passthroughs and nicely flexible grommets make connecting things cleanly a breeze. The vertical graphics card bracket is easy to install, very firm and rigid, and gives me complete confidence in the integrity of an installed GPU. we build this with a 360mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro and the top bracket was strong and sturdy, no flex at all to cause any integrity issues. All around, this case is fantastic to build in, perhaps the smoothest build experience we've ever had.
Even after building the PC, we had concerns about the PSU heat, so we had to test it. In our testing, with a 1 hour simultaneous Furmark and Cinebench test using a 3080 Ti and a Ryzen 7 9700X processor, the PSU put out noticeably more heat with the side panels installed than without. Just for reference, our PSU in this testing is an ASRock Steel Legend SL-850GW. Using a wireless thermometer clipped to the exhaust of the PSU, we measured 69 degrees C. Which is not nice, because we re-ran the testing with the back side panel simply removed and it dropped down to 61 degrees C. This is a demonstrable and noticeable heat difference that would have been easily solved by simply poking a few extra holes for dedicated PSU air. Those extra holes could go on the bottom under the PSU or on the side panel located further back where the intake fans won't steal the PSU's air. And that's on new components with no dust build up. When this system is used, and it gets dirty and dusty, that differential will increase to the point it could become dangerous to the PSU on high performance systems. This is exacerbated by the negative pressure design, which will compound the amount of dust this system collects and make the PSU overheat even faster, over time. For this reason and this reason alone, we cannot recommend this case for any high end builds if you're not going to be dedicated about keeping your PC clean.
Finally, when we looked closely, there were a large number of minor cosmetic blemishes. One scratch on the backside of the lighted Arctic logo glass, where I could not reach unless I uninstalled it, is the worst offender. Other minor issues are spots along the frame of the case where the powdercoated white paint has flaked or chipped off. Minor, and not even visible when put together and closed up, but there all the same.
All of that brings me to the cost. Perhaps the most silly complaint is that the Arctic Xtender is supposed to be sold for ~$200, with the VG version for ~$220, according to the MSRPs listed when this case was announced, with the white versions costing a bit more than black. Even despite the minor complaints and the major issue of the ventless basement, it would definitely be worth that price. Perhaps the current market with tariffs and other difficult factors just hit them worse than others, but this case currently (as of the time of writing this review) can be bought for around ~$260, or ~$300 for the VG version. Which, if I'm being honest, is overpriced. It's a very high quality case with most of the important elements well thought out. It's bold and striking. But it's not worth a ~30%+ increase from the MSRP that was announced. If you're looking for a specific style that this matches, or a case that's easy to build in, I've not seen many cases that do it better. But if you're looking for value per dollar, this is a soft pass.
Still, the only major issue that we have with this case is the ventless basement. In our testing when everything was new and clean, there was no heat issues, but that can change over time with dust buildup. If you plan to regularly clean and service your machine so that dust buildup is not an issue, we don't anticipate this being a problem long term, but that's not a commitment that every PC owner can make, and that's okay. It's up to you to decide if this is the right case for you. Hopefully this review helps you make that decision. If you're interested in buying one for yourself or learning more from the official listings, you can read all about the more technical specs or order your own on Amazon here.
Some photos in this review are out of chronological order. You may see a motherboard installed in one photo but missing in the next, for example. This is because we took notes as we built in this case, and we noticed things in different orders. We did our best to organize this review in a cohesive manner that made it easy to follow and transition cleanly from one topic to the next.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse