Assembly

Installing a motherboard inside the Fractal Design North XL is done by traditional means using spacers and screws. The grommet covered openings line up well with the board, which also holds true with the openings in the shroud. While the North maxes out at 355 mm, which is already plenty for almost all scenarios, the XL steps it up to a 415 mm length limit for GPUs in the default configuration.


Adding a SSD is pretty straight forward as well, you mount it onto the detached tray using screws, once filled, simply pop that tray back into its position on the motherboard tray.


Each of the individual 3.5" hard drive trays may actually hold both a 2.5" and 3.5" unit at the same time, meaning the Fractal Design North can accommodate a total of six drives out-of-the-box, which is plenty. Each of the drives is also held in place by screws and Fractal provides rubber rings for the larger variants as an anti-vibration measure. You may install two trays next to each other. But, unlike the smaller North, you will have to sacrifice one of these if you need both room in the front for cooling and in the rear for a long PSU.


Adding the PSU requires you to screw on the frame first and then slide it into the chassis through the back of the chassis. If you look closely, you can see our unit comes pretty close to the mounting spot of that hard drive tray.


The top of the North XL has no problems at all with a 360 mm AIO. It is both far enough offset and high enough above the board, so that you retain easy access to all the connectors at the top edge of the motherboard.


With everything installed, the Fractal Design North XL makes a very clean interior impression thanks to the well-placed and well-designed grommets. Fractal did well to include grommets on the cable routing openings above the motherboard as well. Only the small cutouts in the shroud for cable management could benefit from slightly better placement, but that is barely noticeable. In the rear, the large hooks for zip ties allow us to create a clean setup, but you really won't need too many to keep everything clean due to the increased number of Velcro strips.

Finished Looks

With the system turned on, you won't see any flashy ARGB components, a deliberate design choice. There is a very subtle golden LED at the top of the chassis to give you some sort of visual feedback that the system is powered on.


Looking at the front of the finished setup, you can actually see a few ARGB elements of the components though the space between the wood strips. The same holds true when looking at the rear of the chassis. While the glass panel has a little bit of a tint, it still allows you to see your hardware. That said, more and more brands are no longer tinting the glass at all, which could be a beneficial improvement for the North series as well due to the fact that they don't ship with any included ARGB elements to provide additional illumination of the components.

Fractal Design Flex 2 PCIe 4.0

As a little encore, Fractal also sent us their Flex 2 PCIe 4.0, which is a vertical GPU mounting kit. It ships in a black, full color box. Naturally, it is also available in white to match the lighter case variant.


The bracket goes in place of the horizontal expansion slot and consists of two brackets that need to be screwed together. Then, the PCIe 4.0 riser cable tugs underneath of that to have the port face upward. A basic assembly manual is also included.


Once you remove all seven horizontal covers, you may use two thumb screws from the case itself to hold the bracket in place. Then simply clip in the GPU and screw it down with a further thumb screw. You could even go as far as to assemble the whole thing, including your graphics card, outside the case and then integrate the whole thing into your existing system.