A Look Inside
The side panels of the case are held into place with captive thumbscrews. Loosening these screws the panels easily come off.
When you remove the main side panel you are still left with that 20% section towards the front of the case. You’ll also find a captive thumbscrew on the smaller panel which unlocks it to be removed. Inside the case we have the familiar 2 compartment design with a power supply cover separating the two compartments. The North XL will support motherboards up to extended ATX (EATX) and the motherboard tray has six large cable routing holes, all of which have the rubber inserts installed.
The power supply cover is pretty much all ventilated, which is a change from the original North. It does have a cut-out in the front so you have room for installing radiators in the front of the case. There is no cover for this cut-out, but I don’t think its a big deal as this section of the case is hidden by the smaller panel. There are also three smaller cable routing holes in the power supply cover, these do not have rubber inserts.
All of the rear I/O covers are ventilated and they do feature thumbscrews.
Taking the opposite side panel off the case we can see how the rest of the case is designed. The first thing that does stand out to me is the fan hub towards the top of the case. The fan hub will support three PWM fans. One thing that is nice is that this time Fractal has pre-wired the included fans to this hub (they didn’t do this on the original).
There are six pre-installed velco straps on this side of the case, which will make organizing your cables quite easy. There are also plenty of tie-down points visible. Just like the original case there is a removable SSD bracket that supports two 2.5-inch SSDs.
Moving down to the bottom compartment of the case we have our power supply mount and you’ll find two removable hard drive trays. These trays will support both a 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drive, so in total this case supports six hard drives out of the box. If you have a longer power supply there are actually different mounting points for these trays.
