Fractal Design - North XL Charcoal Black EATX, ATX, microATX, Mini-ITX Chassis with Walnut Front and Mesh Side Panel Mid Tower PC Case - Black

Pros: Aesthetically looks great. Good front I/O connectivity. Plenty of space inside case to fit motherboard and cooling. Comes with 3 fans. Dust filters. Model has no glass side. No obnoxious LEDs. Cons: Bad noise/acoustics due wood front panel, especially with default fans. 3.5" hdds are pretty limited and hard to work with in this case. Top panel way too easy to slid out accidentally. Price, WAY too expensive for what this case is, the wood panels seem to add like $60 in cost. Thoughts: The number of cases these days that have no "gamer lighting" and no glass panels, are so limited, which is sad. My choices were between this case and the Antec flux pro. This case won out due to lack of front dust filters on Antec and the fact the Antec has glass panel and weights like 10lbs more. This case has some flaws that keep it from being truly amazing. I think part of it is business related. If this case were better, it might eat into Fractal other models sales, so I believe they intentionally make bad decisions. The 3.5" HDD situation is not great. There is easily space for a 2x HDD stacking rack, yet it limits you to 2 single mounts, for a max of 2 3.5" HDDs. I was forced to exchange 1 of my 3.5" 4TB HDDs, for a 2.5" laptop hdd to make it work. The space in the HDD area, is cramped when PSU cables enter the scene. Could easily have been fixed by adding another 0.5" length and height. On top of that, with the 3.5" hdd mounts, if you mount hdd at the bottom of metal bracket, you cant plug in sata power cable. You need a sata power extension cable or you have to mount the 3.5" drive in the "upper" mount holes. The case technically supports a bottom GPU fan, however, the limited spacing and lack of airflow from this section, makes it kind of meh. The Antec and similar cases have shown, a bottom intake fan blowing into the GPUs drastically improves gpu temps. No idea if my bottom fan, which lacks fresh air will do much. Could have been an easy win with better decisions. The wood panels in front create a loud and unpleasant acoustic sound when fans are ramped up to full speed. The default fans are 2000rpm which makes it very bad. I replaced them with 3 of the cheaper 140mm noctuas, and while it is still not great, its tolerable. You want silent low rpm intake fans for this case if you have it on your desk, luckily mine is on floor on side of desk, so I don't really hear it. The case could technically fit 180mm front intakes (would help noise), but they make it impossible, likely due to not conflict with fractal torrent sales. For the price, should include extras, such as stacking HDD racks to mount 2x 3.5" hdds, and possible an alternate swap-able front panel (either all mesh or a flat penal similar to the "silent" fractal cases) to swap out, just due to noise it creates. If you are not getting your cpu/gpu to 100%, the noise is fine or inaudible, but load up cinebench and it becomes a vacuum cleaner if you ears are near it. Honestly shocked they actually chose to put 2000rpm fans as front intakes by default.