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Fractal Define 7 XL upgrade rant

Started by seepage, July 14, 2021, 02:55:47 PM

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seepage

Probably unnecessary but I've just upgraded from my 7 year old 4790K main PC that I've been having some niggles with to something more recent:

CPU: Intel i5-11600K; motherboard: ASUS Prime Z590-A; system drive: Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0; GPU: GTX 1660 Ti from old PC. All put together fine apart from:
- after a clean install of Windows, ASUS asked me if I wanted to download some software. How does it know I exist? Does the motherboard 'phone home, or does Windows link to the motherboard manufacturer's website on first boot now?
- there are f*cking fairy lights all over the motherboard??? I thought it had caught fire.
- USB 3.2 Type C connectors are symmetrical so why isn't the motherboard connector? It's almost symmetrical but not quite. The mobo manual had a warning to put in the right way round but no diagram to help. Eventually found a close-up on YouTube.

Now to the real villain of the piece: the Define 7 XL full tower case. Can't fit in the power supply 'cos there are drive cages in the way. Who's going to put an SFF PSU in a big case? Have to take the dust cover off and undo some screws under the case to be able to slide the cages forward. There's still room for a radiator if the cages are in the forward-most position so why not put them there in the first place? Non-standard motherboard screws. OK, not a biggy. Right, now that's out of the way just need to plop in some HDDs and a DVD drive from my old PC, connect the SATA cables and we're done. Only space for 4 HDDs - in a full tower? Have to take the front panel off and the front fans to fit a bracket for the DVD drive. I suppose it's all about water reservoirs and the death of DVDs these days. Ah, there's a bracket to mount another HDD vertically. Horrible vibration. Ah, it can be screwed to the PSU shroud. Still horrible vibration. Ah, I have to take the whole case apart again to covert it to "storage layout". OK, at last that worked thank God.

tl;dr: far too much faff just to put a few drives in a FULL TOWER.