Review System

Assembly

For this build, we have to deviate from our usual components somewhat, as the Ridge is restricted to 70 mm cooler height. As such, the 65 mm Noctua NH_L9x65 lends itself well, so we just went ahead and used our thermal and noise benchmarking core setup within the chassis. Adding the board is done by traditional means with the use of the spacers and screws. There is a little room around the cooler, so larger, top-blow variants should also fit fine. In case you need to do some cable management at the top edge of the board, say for CPU power or cooler connectivity, simply remove the top panel to gain access. There are some zip tie hooks next to the board as well, allowing you to secure wiring there for a clean build.


Next, we added the Fractal Anode 450 W SFX PSU. Thanks to the removable bracket, prepping it outside of the chassis is an easy task and you may then simply reinsert it. This also allows you to do some creative cable routing by hiding some wires in the gap between the PSU and the SSD mounting plates.


You will easily be able to fit GPUs of up to 335 mm length if you are not using a front mounted SSD, otherwise you have to make do with a slightly shorter 325 mm instead. While the highest-end offerings out there may be longer than this, the vast majority of other SKUs in AMD's, Intel's or NVIDIA's product stack should fit nicely.


One notable limitation of the Fractal Design Ridge is the fact that it does not offer room for a 3.5" drive. Instead there are a total of four mounting placements for 2.5" drives. Using the plates beside the PSU bay, all you have to do is clip the drive into place and move on.


Lastly, before closing up the chassis after successful assembly, you will have to decide if you want to utilize the case standing up, or to lay it down flat. While Fractal primarily advertises the upright variant, you may mount the supplied base elements in two different ways when going for the desktop style positioning.


Looking at the finished build with the Ridge upright, you can clearly see that all the cables of the non-modular PSU are contained in the bottom left corner, with the CPU area clear of any unnecessary wiring. The SSDs are easily accessible and we only had to use a few zip ties to get to this final result. That said, as you can see, we strapped the GPU power cable to the center beam, wheras Fractal could have just drilled a few holes into that to use for zip ties instead. This would ensure that the power cable never interferes with the side mounted fans inside this slim chassis, for example.

Finished Looks

Turning the Fractal Design Ridge on, you finally get to see how Fractal has embedded the white power LED behind the gray cloth to shine through, which is a nifty touch. As there is no RGB lighting on any of the internal components, you won't see other visual elements of the system running.


The front is super clean, while the rear provides access to all the connectivity very nicely. With the power connector on the very bottom, that cable can easily be kept out of sight as well.


The GPU as well as the CPU fan can clearly be seen through the perforated side panel. As such, any ARGB elements from these components should also be visible in your build. On the opposite side, the two black Aspect 14 fans don't really show through their respective opening.


As already hinted, you may place the case on its side with the use of the two-piece stand. For this setup, the Fractal Design Ridge provides two possible variants, as shown above.