Fractal Design Torrent PC Case Review

Complete System

For starters, Fractal sent me their new Ion+ 2 Platinum 660W PSU for this build.

It mounts perfectly in the top of the case, just remember to mount it with the fan facing down.

As you can see, there’s lots of ventilation here, so your PSU gets all the airflow it needs!

And there’s a lot of space for cable routing, more than it looks, as there’s loads of space under those cables.

Plus with the heavily tinted right side window, you cannot see a single cable in there. You could throw in some ARGB SSDs if you wanted to add some flair here though.

Seriously, how freaking awesome does this build look?! It’s basically the cleanest looking build I’ve done in a long time, and frankly, it was also the easiest I’ve done in a long time too.

That chunky AORUS card would look huge any most systems, but it’s of little concern to the Torrent. Length and width clearly aren’t an issue, and that triple slot design has room to spare.

Routing cables to the bottom of the motherboard was easy enough, with some small routing holes for fan and USB cables.

Strangely the fans weren’t pre-wired to the included fan controller. However, it only took two minutes and the results are very clean and tidy overall.

Passing a cable to the graphics card was easy enough, and I actually just ran it through one of the water cooling drain holes, but there are certainly other options available to you here.

As for the cooling performance, wow is this case quiet! I was expecting those big fans to kick up a storm, but they’re actually pretty settled. However, you can certainly feel them pushing a lot of air, even if they don’t have to work too hard to do it.

The front fans blow a tower of air throughout the case. However, those bottom fans push air up at the same time, ensuring passive heat exhaust out or the top/rear of the case. There’s really no need for a rear fan, there’s so much air pressure and so much ventilation, the heat just gets the thrown out.

The motherboard support is excellent, and again, there are huge cable routing holes to accommodate them. My E-ATX motherboard covered the grommet a bit, but routing the 24-pin wasn’t an issue.

Not forgetting the easy to access routing holes above the motherboard. This cable is usually a battle, but not today!

Fitting a large CPU cooler isn’t an issue, clearly. However, I could have gone for something larger, not that it’s needed, even a smaller cooler would still reap the benefit of the brilliant case cooling on offer.

With the power on, you can see that ARGB strip on the PSU shroud. That’s the only lighting on this model, but there are ARGB fan models available too.

With the glass back in place, the light tint hides some of the darker details, with just lighter hardware colours shining through. Of course, this is with the power off.

Power up your system and your RGB hardware will illuminate nicely. That smoked glass softens the light a little too, and it looks great!

While Fractal didn’t send me the ARGB model, they did design these new fans for the ARGB model. So, sit tight, I’ll pop out the black fans and fit these Prisma ones so you can see what the other model would look like.

Swapping the fans out was easy enough, just four screws and you’re done really. They do look great though, and they’re the same 180mm design as the stock fans.

They’re not the brightest RGB fans ever, but they do have a lot of surface area so the ambient lighting effect is decent on the interior.

There’s no RGB control on the case though, so these are hooked up to the header on my motherboard, along with the PSU lighting.

The fans are quite far back from the front of the case. Those fins are deep, plus a huge dust filter, then the fan housing. That means that from off angles, you get a fairly subtle lighting effect. Of course, it’ll be more noticeable in the dark, making the fins glow a little more.

However, straight on, you can see the lighting a lot more. I quite like this, it’s a tasteful integration of RGB, rather than putting on a light show as many cases do.

Of course, that’s subjective, but I like the RGB to light the build, not my room, so this gets top marks from me.