computers I love them you love them but don't you think they're just a little
too dang big gross what I'd rather have
is something small like the fractal Ridge look at that it's just little I
mean it's not the littlest you can get but it's pretty dang small at just 12.6
liters it supports up to a three and maybe even a half slot graphics card
that's over 337 millimeters in length let's take a
look I live in a small apartment because I live in Vancouver and real estate prices are absolutely obscene which is
why I like small computer this fractal Ridge comes in white but it also comes
in black and that's the one we're going to unbox today and build a computer in
oh what fun so we got Ridge accessories I appreciate
fractals attention to detail and uh just
putting in a clearly labeled box it's not just a nondescript box that you will
forget in the future we have a block that I am uncertain as to what
it's for and we have a base stand so this case can be mounted both vertically
and horizontally depending on where you want to put it we got a bunch of screws
we got a pce Gen 4 adapter interesting I
thought we had a riser cable inside the box is
the case itself a nice recyclable paper
packaging and some nice I can't remember
what this is PF pftft this is the styrofoam that the keyboard
nerds want so I'm going to give this to ploop as a gift for front i o we have a
combo 3.5 millimeter headphone microphone Jack two USB 3.0 and a USBC
it's 3.2 Gen 2 not gen 2x2 I don't
believe oh and it's a magnetic front panel this has a nice fabric it is
pretty thick every single panel on this is removable which is going to be great
because when you're working in a small form factor case things can get a little
tricky trying to get into all those tiny crevices and so here we see the included
140 millimeter fans as you can see right here there's a split down the middle you
would put your motherboard and the rest of your components here and then an entirely separate section and intake on
one of the sides for your GPU so these two fans will affect the thickness as
you can I don't know if you can really see it Mark but as you can see it goes it kind of Clips over into the or the
third slot so your mileage may vary I also appreciate captive thumb screws
that makes things a lot easier so these side panels they don't like just slide
off they actually have these two ball mounts or what are these called I don't
know they got those two balls that you stick in there
so this top panel is actually screwed in on both sides on a 140 millimeter fan
and no one does that anymore so here's what you already can mount the 80
millimeter fans sadly we can't mount on the top because we have our i o cables
that come in here as well as a pass-through cable so that we can mount
our power supply which is going I think this is where the power supply is we do
have to take this off to get our power supply in there so we're just taking off
the top panel because we're gonna get to building now from what I've seen so far
it looks like there is two two and a half inch SSD mounts for
three and a half inch Drive mounts it looks like there actually isn't any
options which is disappointing I tend to store a lot of media and like having
backups and stuff like that and so usually my computer always includes some
sort of large capacity hard drive instead of a riser cable you can see
they actually have a riser board so this will plug into the motherboard and then
it passes on through to this side so that you can plug your GPU in a great
value add it's nice that they include that there are still some cases that don't include it or they include it for
an extra cost usually it's like 30 or 40 dollars Cable Management looks okay in
an empty case uh it looks like we'll have a decent amount of space in this
kind of middle area but it can always get hairy once you get Hardware involved
we have some mounting channels along this middle bar right here that are
actually specifically for cables other than that I don't see other specific
mounting points I guess around here if you're running a cable along the edge
but we'll see what happens when we build it after this message from our sponsor
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today for a bill today we have a few options we've brought some things
because I want to make some tests for sizing and fitting we're using ASRock
Phantom gaming b650e it's it's it's the
only am5 ITX board we have we're going to be putting in some Kingston Fury
Beast ddr5 we got 32 gigs of that a
ryzen 7600 X and it will be cooled by an
NHL 12. now CPU cooling is going to be probably the biggest sacrifice you'll
have to make if you're going for a gaming machine here there is just not
much vertical space for cooling you're not going to be able to get a super
large cooler this does have radiator support basically where these fans are
you can fit a 280 millimeter rad that basically will limit you to probably a
single slot graphics card at best and those don't really exist unless you're
water cooling which would be a pretty bold Loop to try and put a 240 ML or a
280 millimeter rad in here I'm not going to try it I've also brought a selection
of gpus so we can do some size tests to see what you can fit in because
sometimes they say the dimensions but if you really believe and are willing to
Force things into their spot you can fit in a little bit more so I'm going to
break a 40 90 today
the maximum cooler height is 70 millimeters which is not very tall yes
66 millimeters tall so it just slides in under it something we won't be able to
do is put a 120 millimeter fan on the top I we probably will not have space
for that
we've encountered some fitment issues with our selected cooler the issue is
that with the way we've currently installed the brackets it'll either go over the top
or if we pronounce it the other way it's going to block that PCIe slot just
barely and because we're using a because it uses a board and not a cable
pretty close actually I think we're okay so while the cooler does technically fit
we also kind of need to be able to screw this riser in I think from that side maybe we
can screw it in from the other side and be okay no because you need the pressure coming in so this is going to be a not
ideal okay I'm trying to put the motherboard in it's something to note this pass through from the power supply
to the back is going to get in the way of you installing your motherboard so
we'll need to just quickly take this out
in the accessories you get some rubber
washers for vibration dampening some SSD mounting screws SSD surf screws case
screws which ones are the motherboard screws it would be nice fractal if you
labeled these in the future so this case can support a
sfx or an sfxl power supply sfx
sfx long just to make my life easier I'm going to
go with the sfx power supply because it's going to give me more space to work
around in so this is going to be fun I got a screw I got to screw through all
of that this is pretty bad okay all right let's try this again oh you know I
did this a little backwards don't make fun of me internet because sometimes I
forget the good advice that I'm supposed to provide and I put the power supply in
without any of the cables plugged in and now it's going to be a whole pain in my
took us to get everything wired incorrectly mistakes were made
fun fact about these fans they come with a four pin and a three pin header so you
can daisy chain them together so you only use one port on your motherboard for both of the fans wow you know how I
talked about how this is going to be an issue screwing it in it's not because
look at this look at what fractal thought about you can take out
that and now I can screw this back on and insert it directly into the PCIe
slot on the board also the computer's not posting but we'll figure that out
don't you worry we put everything into the case we tried
to test to see if it worked and it uh didn't after a little bit of
troubleshooting we're here on another day and we have a new entire system in
it turns out that it was the CPU that was the issue so now we have a Rog strix
x570i motherboard with a ryzen 5800 X
CPU we have 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3600
Mega transfers per second to RAM and then the rest is the same one of the
nice features is that they have this great pass through so you can get cables to the other side of the computer that's
a lot of extra cable that I'm going to have to contend with especially because
this is just going to have the side panel on it so as with any ITX case you
should always consider maybe getting custom length cables since this is a
tool-less amount it should be as easy as just uh just kind of pushing around
there hey look at that yeah I was like fractal gave us the included cable ties
which is great because uh as you can see there's a lot of cables here as I showed
earlier there are these 80 millimeter fan mounts just in here you won't be
able to fit them in with the 140s just because of this lip you might have to do
the 140s afterwards also you should note that this removes some of the potential
height of your GPU I think using these 80 millimeter fans at the top it's not a
terrible idea this is the divider that means that this case is not separated
into two Chambers so as your CPU heats up that's going to kind of just exist
because there's no intake or outtakes on
the CPU side you're kind of going to rely on your CPU fan just pulling away
heat or blowing heat out we have it configured to blow upwards and exhaust
heat taking away from the motherboard but if you start to saturate it it is
going to kind of just linger in the case so this might be a better way to get
some more exhaust man it is so nice that you can take off literally every side of
this that made building in it so much easier but what about a 3080 TI that
looks like it's going to fit no problem with the founders Edition at the very
least now there's a lot of really beefy 3080 TI's this is a 40 90.
famously thick I'm not hopeful that's a
that's a no-go I think it's it's gonna be the plastic shroud that's I can't
like see what happens I'll get it get rid of
the other fan yeah yeah I know right and they're gonna and
because it's like a four slot GPU it's gonna go right up against the intake
it's three it's four slots it's more than three it's automatically four
there's no such thing as a three and a half slot GPU Moment of Truth
so dang close if we just get a little
bit of a extending action going oh yo
shut the front door does it actually go in
what is it what is what is preventing me from succeeding here
holy crap if this actually works I don't think that this is actually designed to
support cards this big uh uh but we're
going to places where fractal would probably not recommend going who says I
need a 40 90 but I also need small form factor again it's slightly separated so
probably gonna be okay come on just a
little bit of that there's a little bit of a
and then are they supposed to go in there they
slide to these little these little brackets I gotta slide this
thing into this is such a heavy card what huh
but then this is not mounting I don't know how it would work with another card
then oh my god what have I done I'm bending the this case it's okay it's
metal that bends back yeah that came off they give you this
little extender that extends the height here
so now we're cooking with gas if you want a
40 90 and I don't recommend doing this you're going to want to have at least
one of these little bracket Parts unattached because you're going to need
you can you're gonna need some bending to happen here yeah it's just it'll get
back into shape it's just like I me I say that every year how am I going to
connect the power that's going to be the issue it's in all the way this is just
needs to be this just needs to be a
pressed up so I think we're gonna freaking do oh no I
forgot about this piece
shut up we're still good we're still
good so we're using a little bit of extra
Manpower yeah yeah you've got ample
extra man power Bell
um because uh this is not how it's supposed to go and we need to put a little bit of extra pressure to get
these screws to line these screw holes to line up uh we're almost there I'm
just getting this last panel screwed on we put a 40 90 in it I guess through our
bending in tomfoolery this uh this button doesn't really press at the front
now when we put the magnetic front panel on so that doesn't really press in like
it used to and maybe even is actually pressing it
right now and it's turning it off I think that's literally what's
happening this is 130 which is a really good value for a
small form factor case these can get very very expensive there's lots of 250
dollar like specialty cases that are going to be of a similar size to this
thermally this looks like it won't be the best performer it's probably not as
ideal as say a sandwich layout where you can fit a couple more radiators but at
just 12.6 liters I think fractal has really succeeded in making a product
that is both accessible not just by price but to build in and would be a
great place to begin if you want to start messing around with small form
factor stuff so you can either put it vertically on this stand you put it on
the stand like this or you can mount it horizontally now the Eagle Eye among you
might have noticed that there's some random little big holes all over this that's not just for mounting fans it's
also for mounting this case on its side and then you can have your case in a
console like fashion so if it fits it so it can fit in as a home theater PC you
can keep hearing it turning on and off I think fractal has a winner on their
hands this is a great case at a great price it's easy to build in it's very
flexible in terms of configurations thermally I think it would perform
pretty well I have heard some other reviews saying that there have been some
issues just because you're limited by your CPU Cooler height you could put in
a Rad but then that's going to get all sorts of complicated over on this side
but 130 bucks it's an awesome deal good
job fractal I really like this case I kind of want it for myself if you like
this video why don't you go and watch our video on the fractal North which is
a bougie ass looking case I can say bougie ass can I say that