Review System

Assembly

Installing a motherboard inside the Fractal Design North is done by traditional means using spacers and screws. The slightly angled grommet covered openings line up well with the board, which also holds true with the openings in the shroud. Even though the North is a rather short case, you should have no issues installing potent GPUs within, as Fractal mentions a solid 355 mm length limit in the default configuration.


Adding an SSD is pretty straight forward as well, you simply 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 are 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 and a third suspended from the shroud ceiling. Should you opt to only put one on the floor, then there are a total of four possible locations to pick from.


Adding the PSU requires you to screw on the frame first and then slide it into the chassis through the back of the chassis. There is ample room unless you use the HDD cage mounting position closest to the PSU bay. That cuts the space down to a mere 155 mm, which could be too tight for some units.


A 240 mm AIO will certainly fit within the Fractal Design North ceiling, but it will be a rather tight fit, just barely clearing motherboard heatsinks and tall ARGB memory. As such, you will need to invest the time to pre-route and connect any wiring at the top of the motherboard.


With everything installed, the Fractal Design North makes a very clean interior impression. The side fan bracket may be installed at different heights, so that you may focus your cooling on the expansion slots or slightly higher, allowing NVMe SSDs or the CPU to also benefit. In the rear, the large hooks for zip ties allow us to create a clean setup, but it does require far more zip ties that Fractal provides out of the box.

Finished Looks

With the system turned on, you won't see any flashy ARGB components, a deliberate design choice. There is a very subtle white 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 perforated side panel, as well as the rear of the Fractal Design North.