A Look Inside
Taking the side panel off and looking inside we pretty much have the same layout as the original Define S2. The case is more or less separated into two main compartments. With the main compartment visible and a full-length power supply shroud covering the bottom section of the case. A new addition is towards the front of the power supply shroud. On the Define S2 this was just removable to make room for thicker radiators, but now this section can also be used as a reservoir mount and even has tubing pass-through holes. The SSD mounts (which you’ll see in just a little bit), can be mounted in three different places on the power supply shroud.
Moving up into the main compartment we have support for motherboards all the way up to E-ATX. All of the expansion slots use thumbscrews which is nice to see. There are six cable routing holes around the motherboard tray, which all but one have rubber inserts. Towards the front of the case are reservoir mounts. If you leave the tempered glass top panel on the case you’ll find the ARGB strip attached to it. While Fractal Design says this is magnetic, it is affixed to this section of the case with an adhesive (we assume 3M tape), so removing it or moving it around the case is a little bit tricky.
Taking the other side panel off we can see how the rest of the case is setup. The first thing that caught my attention on the backside of the motherboard tray is the fan hub. This is the Nexus 9P PWM fan hub, which can power up to nine PWM fans and has a maximum power output of 36W. Right below the fan hub are two large velcro straps to help with cable routing and there are a handful of tie-down spots visible as well.
All of the storage for the case resides of the backside of the case, which has become more common over the past year with many different cases. First there are three large removable trays towards the front of the case. These trays support both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. There are two more smaller removable 2.5-inch SSD trays towards the rear of the case. These trays as we mentioned can be mounted on the power supply shroud in three different locations. So in total you have room for up to five hard drives out of the box, but if you purchased extra SSD mounts you could increase that to eight.
At the bottom of the case there is an opening where your power supply will sit and makes it easy to route all of your cables. One thing that I did want to point out is that none of the fans were connected to the fan hub by default. We have seen other cases with fan hubs have the fans connected to the hub by default. Also the ARGB connection on these fans can be daisy-chained, and they are not connected either. It would have been nice to see all of these fans connected correctly so all you had to do was either connect them to your motherboard or the RGB controller. Instead you just get a bunch of cables you have to connect yourself.
