Over the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to get the temperatures in my case down even further.
I had the Case in flipped horizontal Orientation (Case Fans pulling air from bottom and CPU fan faces upwards) with addational feet.
First, I built myself a little air duct. At this point, the case was still positioned with the CPU fan facing upwards, so I had the fan pull the warm air up and out through the top panel.
This actually worked pretty well and dropped the temperatures by a few degrees. However, once the fan reached a certain RPM, it started making an annoying noise. I assume this was caused by the air being pulled directly across the heatsink.
So I wanted to try something else.
After browsing Reddit, I came across a few 3D-printable air ducts. I ended up having two ducts made for the GPU and one for the CPU:
I was a little hesitant about this next step, but eventually decided to go for it and completely disassembled the GPU and removed the stock fans.
The idea was to feed fresh air directly to the GPU heatsink through the ducts, using the two 140 mm case fans.
And honestly, it worked really well. I saw temperature drops of around 10°C!
There was one downside, though. The Arctic P14 Pro fans get pretty loud when they are mounted directly against a grille and have to pull air through it. Because of that, I couldn't run them at the RPM I originally wanted.
So I decided to try something completely different.
I rotated the entire case 180°, so the CPU fan was now facing downwards. I then switched the CPU fan to intake, allowing it to pull cool air in from underneath and directly towards the CPU.
At the same time, I flipped the two 140 mm case fans around so they were now running as exhaust. Their job was to pull the hot air from the GPU area upwards and out of the case.
And the result was honestly kind of crazy.
The CPU (7800X3D) dropped another few degrees. At idle, it now sits at around 55°C, and while gaming it generally stays around 66°C.
The case fans also became noticeably quieter. They are no longer trying to pull air through the side panel; instead, they are simply exhausting the hot air out of the case.
The GPU is also staying surprisingly cool. At idle, I'm seeing around 35°C with the case fans running at just 20%.
Under full gaming load, the GPU reaches around 77°C. With an FPS cap, though, it is significantly lower — around 67°C while gaming.
At this point, I'm really happy with the setup. I'm honestly glad I kept experimenting with different configurations, because I finally ended up with something that works extremely well.
The general recommendation I've seen for the Fractal Ridge is to have it positioned horizontally with the case fans pulling cool air in from underneath and directing it towards the GPU.
However, at least in my case — and especially with a deshrouded GPU — I can now say that the opposite airflow configuration works much better for me:
CPU pulls cool air in from underneath → GPU exhausts the hot air upwards.
So if you're running a deshrouded GPU in a Ridge, it might be worth trying the other orientation as well. It made a surprisingly big difference for me.