Fractal Design Ridge Mini-ITX Case Review

A Closer Look – Exterior

The Ridge is available in either black or white, and as you can see here, I have the black one… obviously! First impressions are good though, this case feels quite heavy for its size, and it feels really robust. That’s not particularly shocking though, as Fractal Design build its cases like an old Volvo, everything is just of a higher quality than most PC cases and you can feel that.

Slim it may be, but this case promises excellent airflow for all of your hardware. As you can likely see, there are perforated holes on the left side. The case is split into an upper and lower chamber, which is why there’s a break in the perforated design near the middle of the panel.

On the other side, a similar perforated design, but this time only on half of the panel.

There’s further ventilation up on this edge, I’m inclined to call it the top, but it would appear this case can be orientated in a few different ways. The bottom of the case has even more ventilation and looks basically the same. Honestly, there’s so much material cut out of it I’m surprised the case is as heavy as it is.

The rear of the case shows you exactly how things are orientated, with the motherboard sitting in the upper chamber, while the graphics card is mounted below it and laid parallel in a vertical GPU mount.

Triple slots will allow you to get a pretty serious GPU in here, albeit, keeping in mind that mini-ITX motherboards only have 1 PCIe slot, so the triple slot design is exclusively for thicker cards, not multiple devices.

The front panel looks stunning, and it’s a testament to the overall quality of this case. It’s not a plastic surround, but 6mm anodized and CNC’d aluminium, giving it a premium quality look and feel.

There’s a cloth covering, which provides a lovely contrast in dark grey.

It’s magnetically mounted too, so you can just pop it off to clean the filters. Behind it, the panel is hard plastic, with a perforated design. However, the holes are much larger than those featured on the side panels.

Under that panel, you have SSD mounts rather than fan mounts.

The front I/O is nice too, with a central power button, two USB 3 ports, and the on the outer edges, an audio jack and a USB Type-C port.