Fractal Ridge + 5090 FE + 9800x3d

Crazy that this amount of power fits in something of this size. I’ve always wanted a dedicated living room gaming machine, so I was excited to build this knowing that I could go for uncompromised gaming performance. 4k 144hz OLED HDR gaming with surround sound seemed like a pipe dream until very recently.

I haven’t put it through stress testing to measure temps properly, but I ran it with and without some intake fans (Noctua A12x25) next to the GPU.

The short story: Running the Noctua fans at 40% during a Cyberpunk session seems to keep the GPU fans from running maxed out when the , so I’m probably going to keep them in.

I saw an average of 79c (86c highest) without the Noctua’s, and 74c (20c ambient) with them running at 40%. I forgot to note the GPU fan speeds, but I could easily hear that they were running at lower speeds on average, with less ramp ups too.

This was with the card running completely stock, so I imagine things will improve slightly when I have some time to dial things in.

This is my first build in a case this small, so I was a little concerned about the fans working against each other but it looks like I had nothing to worry about.

Also, the coil whine is very real on these cards, but is helped by capping the FPS. My deshrouded MSI 4090 Gaming X Slim (shown in the latter pics) has none, so running the FE feels like a bit of a step back in terms of noise levels.

It definitely ran cooler too, but with that said, it’s almost the same size deshrouded as the 5090 FE is in its entirety.

Hope this helps anyone considering doing the same.

Build specs: • Case: Fractal Design Ridge • Motherboard: ASUS RoG Strix B650E-I (Wi-Fi card swapped to Intel AX210) • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (delidded, running with Thermal Grizzly AM5 High-Performance Heat Spreader) • Cooler: Thermalright AXP120-X67 • RAM: 96GB Corsair Vengeance 6000MHz CL30 (heat spreaders removed) • Storage: Corsair 8TB MP600 Pro XT • PSU: Corsair SF750 (awaiting SF1000)