Review System

Assembly

As the PSU is on top of the case frame, one may install it right away without worrying about restricting the space needed for inserting the motherboard. With 230 mm of space, there is plenty of room for even longer units, and our 850 W PSU leaves us with plenty of room for cable management. A single, centered Velcro strip keeps excess cable in that space, so you won't have to deal with it behind the motherboard tray.


Installing the motherboard is done by traditional means, using the pre-installed spacers and provided screws. The center spacer is equipped with a pin instead, so you should run into no issues when aligning your board as well. As you can see, the massive D15 has plenty of room all around. Fractal Design mentions clearance of up to 188 mm for air coolers, which translates into the ability to use essentially every air cooler the market offers without the chassis restricting your choice.


There is also plenty of room for even the longest GPUs. The pre-installed fans don't even get close to the 2080 Ti, so those looking for push/pull radiator setups or custom loops and reservoirs should be just fine as well. The metal GPU support bracket works really well, and thanks to the 45 degree angle, you are able to place it without it interfering with any of the fans.


To add a 2.5" drive to the Torrent, simply take one of the four plates and screw the drive into place. Once filled, pop it right back where you found it. The connectors of the drive face towards the back of the case, so while cables may get in the way a little at first, connecting the drives ports posed no real issues when it came down to it.


Installing 3.5" drives is done in a similar fashion, but using the larger trays. The mounting screws rest on rubber rings as an anti-vibration measure, and the connector of the drive is meant to face upward.


With everything installed, the interior of the Fractal Design Torrent looks nice and clean. Things are clean enough even behind the motherboard tray, but as is pretty apparent by our highly visible, red zip ties, getting to this state was quite a lot of work. As each fan comes with two separate cables, you have to daisy-chain the ARGB ones. That just results in a big mess to be contained and thus quite a bit of extra work. Add that the 3-pin ARGB connectors come apart extremely easily and things can go from calm but lengthy to frustrating troubleshooting once the system is turned on for the first time.

Assembly - Liquid Cooling

Before we look at the case closed up and turned on, let's pick up where we left off with the 360 mm AIO. The rails are held in place by four screws, and the fans and radiator fit perfectly fine after a little finessing of their vertical placement. With this unit, why there is that opening in the ceiling of the Torrent becomes very apparent, as the Celsius+ S36 Prisma needs that room while giving you easy access to its built-in PCB.


Even though the Fractal Design Torrent is a rather large chassis, the AIO can easily reach the CPU socket as well.


With everything installed, you can see the three 120 mm fans of the AIO pretty clearly through the front of the chassis as well.

Finished Looks

Now, with that done, let's get back to the air-cooled variant and how it stacks up when turned on as well. A white LED lights up underneath the power button, which is nice to look at, and the fans included with the Torrent are nice and quiet as well.


Unfortunately, the ARGB LEDs in the hub are very badly placed right at the gap between fan blades and hub mounting. This results in them being very apparent when looking at the chassis through the glass side window. The power supply ARGB strip lights up subtly as well, which may also be a little disappointing to some.


The LED placement results in most of the glow spilling out behind the fan blades, which reduces the visibility through the front of the chassis considerably. In the rear, the Velcro strips really help in keeping the external cable mess tidy, but as the strips are not secured in any way, you will struggle using them for more than 2–3 cables without the strips sliding into the case in the process, which means popping the side panel open to retrieve it.