Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL Chassis Review

System Build & Testing

Internals will be as follows:

• MSI MEG X570 Godlike Gaming
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
• 32GB of HyperX Fury RGB 3200MHz
• MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G
• Corsair MP600 2TB M.2 SSD
• Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 ARGB 850w

We always try to do as much as possible to the motherboard before installing it in the case, so we pre-populated our M.2 drive, CPU, and memory. Fractal’s Meshify 2 XL came with the standoff’s configured for a full-size board, so we didn’t have to adjust anything here.

We’re using Fractal’s Celsius+ 360 AiO cooler. The longest part of this step is screwing the fans into the radiator. The top mounts are slotted so we can move the rad around during the install before tightening it down.

We are using a beautiful GPU in this build that we want to vertical mount, but it’s a pretty thick card, and having it next to the glass door would cause it to run a bit warmer than we’d like. We’ll be using Fractal’s new Flex B-20 vertical GPU bracket to get a mounting location a bit further away.

Since there are no dividers in the Rear I/O slots, we can just pop the Flex B-20 right in, the PCIe cable length lets us move this down to slots 2-8 so we can see a bit more of our board. We’ll take this opportunity to run the front panel I/O cables to the bottom of the board while we still have easy access.

With the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G installed, we decided to loosen the AiO radiator up a bit and slide it back. This gives us enough slack to route the tubes up over the memory.

From here, we replaced the original black fans with Fractal’s Prisma RGB fans and wired them all to the AiO. The radiator has connections for its fans for power, but the RGB can be daisy-chained. Last was the PSU install, and that took about 3 minutes to slap it in, run 2 CPU power cables, the motherboard cable, and a pair of PCIe cables.

That’s pretty much it. Hit the power button and watch everything come to life! The case fans and AiO pump match up nicely.

The rest of the system was doing its own thing, so we had to load MSI’s software in Windows so we could set the entire system how we wanted. Since the Celsius+ AiO connects to a motherboard ARGB header, it follows right along with everything else.

The dark-tinted side panel of the Meshify 2 XL makes getting pictures that do it justice difficult but trust us when we say the build looks amazing all closed back up, especially in the dark.