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r/FractalDesign

▲ 13 r/FractalDesign

Best after-sales support ever

I want to share with you all my experience with the after-sales support of my pc case, as I've never received so damn good service.

I bought a Fractal case for my new setup some months ago and I scratched my tempered glass side panel while doing some maintenance.

I reached to them and asked to buy a replacement, as I couldnt find it in any web. They responded very quick and sent me a replacement FREE OF CHARGE in less than a week (I live in Spain).

When I received it I saw to my dismay that they had sent a metal panel, not a tempered glass one. I reached to them again and they proceeded to send again the panel, with the same promptness and with the correct item this time. And again, FREE OF CHARGE.

All in all, I love my POP XL AIR and I really appreciate the service. Love you guys!

https://preview.redd.it/da8yms00zbkh1.jpg?width=3072&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e53b4c8a9a0026fe1888c81a46e2be85876c7c21

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u/secspeare — 21 hours ago
▲ 404 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

Floating Fractal Terra

Long time lurker on this great subreddit 😄

Building this bad boy since 2025. My latest update was a thinner gpu. I went from a 70mm thick/450w gpu to a 50mm thick/400w. At the same time I upgraded the standard cpu cooler. My next update will be a beastier cpu-cooler when I need it (not for now). I game mostly @ 4K Dlss- 60Fps Ray tracing or Patch tracing.

The most interesting thing about this build are the bottom coolers and the little feet. Maybe you've seen it already on some other builds, but I really cracked my brain about how to improve cooling in this case while keeping the original aesthetics.

The case sits 90cm off the ground on a desk. From this viewpoint, it appaers to float. It stands 10mm higher than the original feet. I found those custom screws/feet on amazon.

  • Intel 14600K clocked @ 100W
  • Thermalright AXP90-X47 Full copper cooler with Noctua NF-A9 PWM chromax black
  • Asrock Z790i Lightning Wifi mobo
  • Corsair SFX 1000W
  • Gskill Ripjaws s5 DDR5 6800 - 32Gb kit
  • Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 Oc edition
  • Bottom Case: 2 X Noctua NF-A12x15 PWM Chromax black

The gaming screenshot is cyberpunk 4K, everything on max with path tracing Dlss Performance.
This area in dogtown pushes my cpu to 82°C max & my gpu to 70°C max (and the fps below 60). Every other game (or area in cyberpunk) is cooler.

u/Spike2100 — 4 days ago
▲ 21 r/FractalDesign

North in Black glass side with White CPU air cooler and white GPU?

I am building a new PC for my office. I've purchased a black Fractal North and 6x black Fractal Momentum 12 RGB fans to place in every slot. I don't plan to do wacky RGB colours, probably something muted or even turn it off. It's more to build as quiet and cool as possible. a "forever case" if you will.

I originally tried a Hyte X50 in white but it was just not good in our room at all(see pic). I should have known lol. I'd already purchased a Thermalright Spirit 120 digital in white because of this. I'm considering keeping it.

I'm curious what people think of a build in a black North with a white CPU cooler and GPU like a Sapphire Pure 9070XT. The glass section will not be visible to the rest of the house, it will appear as a solid black case with wood accents from a distance. It's only when you come around to sit at the desk that you will be able to see into the side.

Thanks!

u/bemurda — 3 days ago
▲ 414 r/FractalDesign+5 crossposts

Finally built my compact ITX setup — Ryzen 7 9700X + RTX 5070

Went for a small-form-factor build with a focus on keeping it compact without compromising too much on performance.
Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
Motherboard: Gigabyte B850I AORUS PRO
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 64GB (32GB × 2) DDR5 5200MHz
SSD: Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB NVMe
GPU: PNY RTX 5070 12GB EPIC-X ARGB
Case: Fractal Design Terra Mini-ITX
CPU Cooler: DeepCool AN600
PSU: Cooler Master V SFX Gold 850W — ATX 3.1

The main goal was to build something compact, clean and powerful enough for both gaming and everyday productivity, while keeping the overall footprint as small as possible.

u/SINU566 — 4 days ago
▲ 271 r/FractalDesign

Fractal North white build

Just updated my North white build, let me know what you think about it. Specs: Mobo-Gigabyte B850 aorus elite wifi7 ice, GPU-rtx 4080super Zotac trinity white oc, CPU-Ryzen 7 7800x3d, PSU- corsair RM1000e white, SSD- Silicon power nvme gen4 2tb, RAM- silicon power zenith 2x 16gb DDR5

u/Derus223 — 4 days ago
▲ 8 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

Accidentally Bought Wrong Size, Opinions

I'm an idiot and I accidentally bought three Noctua G2 120 mm fans to replace the front fans in my Fractal North XL.

What are y'all thinking? Go through the trouble of returning reordering and waiting or just go with the 120s?

Kind of leaning towards just putting the 120s in but would like to hear what other people would do out of curiosity.

I'm also going from a Peerless Assassin 120 digital to a 360 mm Noctua AIO if that matters.

reddit.com
u/gamingoldschool — 4 days ago
▲ 28 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

Modding my North XL to eliminate annoying sounds!

I recently bought a cheap Asus x Noctua 4080 Super on Ebay and Ive been obsessing over making my builds even quieter ever since. I thought that it would be nice to share my modifications with you guys, because I know that a lot of people own this case in this community.

Issue nr. 1 -> Front fan turbulence:

This is how I mounted my fans so far. I have identified two sources of turbulence in this configuration: The mounting brackets behind the fans and the wood grills in front of the fans. You can see how much the 120mm rails overlap with the fans.

First thing to fix were the mounting brackets:

I used a dremel with a cutting disk to remove the excess metal. Make sure to insulate the rest of the case like I did here if you wanna do this yourself.

To reduce the turbulence coming from the wood grills I mounted the fans on the backside of the mounting rails, instead of the front:

This modification reduces GPU clearance by a bit, but its not a problem with the XL variant. The front fans are much quieter at high RPMs now.

Issue nr. 2 -> GPU coilwhine. Sadly this cannot be fully fixed, but it can be reduced by undervolting and dampening the case. I dont use top fans, so I closed the top of the case with noise-absorbing mats:

Before...

...and after! I used Silverstone SST-SF01 dampening foam. Because the coilwhine is so high-pitched, even thin foam mats prevent it from escaping through the top. Its significantly less audible from my desk now.

And this is how it looks from the inside. Rather clean if I may say so myself :). You can also see the inside-mounted fans here

And this is how it looks all put together. You cant really see the modified front mounting or foam mats through the grills.

All in all the system is much quieter now, but more importantly to a Noctua owner: It makes a more pleasing sound now, less howling and whining.

Let me know what you think!

reddit.com
u/aceCrasher — 5 days ago
▲ 5 r/FractalDesign+4 crossposts

New PC Build

I am ready to order the remaining PC parts.

Though I am worried about my Motherboard clearance and the radiator on the top mounted Arctic Freezer pro III. I would prefer to mount it on the top rather then the front.

Does anyone have a similar setup in the Momentum XL case?

buildcores.com
u/Glatan-Ardent — 4 days ago
▲ 78 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

*Need Advice* Fractal Ridge build

This is gonna be ridiculous and I am by no means a professional, this is my first time dealing with a small form factor PC. I got a fractal node 202 build and decided to take it to a shop I found reputable, for them to transfer the components into a Fractal Ridge. I know I should have just done it myself, but I had a lot of things going on and just wanted it to be taken care of. Anyway, I told the technician take his time in building it and he calls me a week later saying the case is too hard to work in; he couldn’t fit my 9060XT in the gpu socket without cutting some parts in the back of the case and I told him not to do that. What he did not tell me was that he was going to hot glue my gpu to stay in place. I didn’t find out until opening it up after my computer kept rebooting during any steam game update or intense gaming session. The only reason I found out my gpu was glued was because I figured I’d open up the computer and see if maybe there was a problem with my sata drive since this problem was only happening during downloads or playing games like Witcher 3. Again I’m no professional, but the drive was just hanging not anchored to anything, and the connector had a piece that aligned the wire with the sata cable port and it was broken. I check on the rest of the computer and see that the gpu was glued down almost diagonally. For whatever reason the computer does not display anymore and when i boot up the computer the motherboard powers on but the fans on the gpu seem to no longer be spinning. I dont know what to do from here honestly and any advice would be appreciated. I feel like this whole project has been a money sink and it shows me how out of my depth I am at this shit.

u/chumgruntley1 — 8 days ago
▲ 0 r/FractalDesign

PSA about Torrent PSU position

I was a happy Torrent user up until recently. All my monitored temps were great, I even experimented a bit with switching front fans for AP181 but found Fractals better all around. Acoustics were also great, everything seemed fine.

Come August of this year and a tremendous heatwave hits my location. Under AC my room temps werent dropping much under 30C. The system took this in stride, CPU and GPU temps remained well under the limits, 75C Tdie on CPU and 84C hotspot on GPU. The system was not tuned for airflow, all the fans had custom fan curves but they really werent pulled back too much, bottom fans were ~800RPM and fronts at about 650RPM. CPU is 9600X cooled by NH-D15 G2 (~800RPM) and GPU is Sapphire Radeon 9070XT Pure (~1500RPM).

It was all well and good on the things we all monitor, RAM and GPU RAM temps were also fine, VRM's, all you can read, but I didnt think about PSU temp nor could I read it. After a couple of days of hard gaming at elevated ambient temp my PSU, Corsair RM850x v2018 blew up violently and I was wondering what the hell went wrong. PSU's are rated at 50C ambient, at least this was, at full load, mine was doing 60% at best, at 30C ambient that really shouldnt be the cause. As I looked at the Torrent design I realized that PSU isnt fed true ambient (room) but case ambient. Once I changed the PSU I did some testing on the air that is circulating at the PSU vent opening with a temperature probe and its catastrophic to say the least.

With all case fans and all component fans running adequately fast to cool down all the components at 30C room temp well within their spec your PSU wont be cooled properly, it wont be cooled at all, it will be heated, substantially. Once I probed the air right under the PSU fan, dead center, while the system was running a decently demanding game, total system power 470W, the air temp was measured at 47C basically 5 minutes into the game, I stopped the test at 50C but thats about where it would find equilibrium. This is the "ambient" feeding your PSU in a default setup Torrent. I tried upping the front fans by a lot and even with completely destroyed acoustic profile (jet engine sounds) that "ambient" didnt drop under 44C.

If you have a more powerful system, that outputs even more heat, you are definitely shorting PSU lifespan by making it run at +15-20 over room ambient. If you live in a hot climate this is detrimental to your PSU. Furthermore, most cases consider PSU a closed system, this one doesnt, but it doesnt warn you of implications either.

There should at least be something about setting custom curves in the manual but even on default the problem isnt solved, its just becomes barely in spec, provided your ambient doesnt go over 30C. I checked, there isnt anything even hinting this. No warnings about PSU temps with any fan orientation or anything regarding minimum fan speeds. There really ought to be.

TL;DR Fractal owes me a PSU. Torrent case is feeding "case ambient" to your PSU which might be well over the safe limit if your true ambient (room) get a bit hotter (30C or over). It aint peachy on 25C either, barely in spec, at the edge of it.

reddit.com
u/RealAlphaKaren — 7 days ago
▲ 32 r/FractalDesign

Presenting Purple Penelope

Hi all!

I just wanted to share my latest build. I had originally built this with the idea of selling it, but I’ve liked the finished look so much that I think I might hold on to this bad boy.

I was going for an RGB look that wasn’t too over the top and I think I’ve nailed the assignment, though I am biased. I’ve gone with an air cooler because I like how it adds to the overall look.

I really do love how it turned out and wanted to share with all. The specs are as follows:

CPU: 7800X3D
GPU: 5090 Astral
RAM: Kingston Fury 64gb 6000 MHz CL30
Mobo: Asus Prime X870-P
CPU Cooler: Ocypus Iota A62 BK
Case: Meshify 3XL RGB (non-ambience)
SSD1: 1TB gen4 (OS and system applications)
SSD2: 2TB gen4 (games)

Side note: shout out to fractal who replaced a broken side panel at no cost - this simple move has gotten them a customer for life. Additional side note: I really wish fractal did the momentum fans in reverse blade. The NZXT fans I’ve got in the case as side mounted intake are a pale imitation.

u/moresalt84 — 6 days ago
▲ 994 r/FractalDesign+2 crossposts

My First Proper Homeserver - Update

I have made a post some months ago about "My First Proper Homeserver" and the time has come for an update. I have made some changes on the hardware and the software got updated too. The process is really slow, because of work- and family-related things ("casual life" in other words) and because I'm a beginner (in homelab topic) but want to do things possibly right.

The actual status:

  • Proxmox VE 9.1.7 - up and running
  • qbittorrent nox - up and running
  • Jellyfin - up and running
  • Nextcloud - transfer from old server under planning
  • Wireguard - to do
  • Pi-hole - to do
  • To find out what else - to do

The actual HW:

  • Supermicro X10DRL-i (Mainboard)
  • 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4 (CPUs)
  • 8x 32GB SK-Hynix DDR4 RDIMM (RAM)
  • HP 562FLR-T 10Gb 2-Port Ethernet Adapter in a PCIe X8 FlexibleLOM adapter (Network card)
  • PNY nVidia P1000 4GB (Graphics card forJellyfin transcoding)
  • Intel Optane 900P 280GB (Storage for ZFS Log)
  • LSI 9400-16i (RAID controller card in IT-mode, connecting the drives of the ZFS-pools)
  • Supermicro AOC-SLG-2M2 with a pair of 480GB Micron NVMe SSDs (Storage for Metadata / Cache)
  • PCIE to USB 3.2 Expansion Card connected the front panel
  • 12x Micron 5200 1.92TB (Storage - Bigpool)
  • 4x Toshiba 1.6TB (Storage - Smallpool)
  • 3x Samsung PM883 480GB SATA SSD (Redundant VM storage)
  • 1x Samsung CM871a 256GB SATA SSD (Storage for Host OS)
  • Fractal Design Define 7 (Case)
  • 2x Xilence XC061 (CPU coolers)
  • 2x Arctic P9 PWM PST (Fans cooling the add-on cards)
  • 4x Arctic P14 PWM PST (Intake and exhaust fans)
  • Seasonic Platinum Fanless 520W (Power supply unit)
  • Corsair Commander Pro (Fan controller)

Yes, the 520W PSU is sufficient. In the actual state the whole server needs 120W with some 140W-spikes. And if anyone wants to know, the HP 562FLR-T card in the FlexLOM adapter fits perfectly over the RAM sticks, it still has 4-5mm clearance.

Edit: correcting typos, details, purposes

u/Bearded_Coffeepot — 12 days ago
▲ 7 r/FractalDesign

Looking for Define R5 drive bay

I'm looking to buy a drive bay for the Define R5. It's the one that sits in the middle and can carry a boatload of disks. The R5 case that I found is missing this bay, and if I want to be sure I can expand my NAS into these slots.

The bay is the "top HDD cage" that sits in the middle of the box (see the red encircled part in the image). I contacted Fractal but they no longer stock this item as the case is EOL. The official SKU for the upper HDD cage is: SP-FD-TOPHDDCAGE-001-BK.

Can anyone help me out? I noticed some enthusiast pages in Japan but that will probably not be of any help 😄 .

u/Soft-Tangerine-2278 — 8 days ago
▲ 2 r/FractalDesign

Anyone know if there are production/shipping issues from Fractal?

Hello everyone,

For the past year, I've been accumulating parts for a living room itx PC. I only need the Fractal Ridge now. I have noticed that they are becoming rarer and rarer in my area (France/Germany), and prices keep skyrocketing. A month ago I could buy from numerous stores. Now, only one store offers it, and shipping is expected between October and March 2027!

Does anyone know if Fractal are running low on supply, or are there issues with their shipments?

reddit.com
u/MichiganRedWing — 8 days ago
▲ 6 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

AXP120-X67 with a 140x15mm fan

Hey guys,

Long story short: FD Ridge with a MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI & AXP120-X67 CPU cooler.

CPU temps are fine, however, I've been running the M.2 fan at 10% speed due to noise.
This keeps my xHCI temps above 70 degrees in idle, 80+ under load.

I've had some intrusive thoughts on getting a TL-B14015 to replace the stock fan of the AXP120, but it's slightly troublesome to get them in EU.

What do you guys think? Is it stupid? Is it worth the effort? Will it help with my xHCI temps?

Thanks a bunch in advance!
Cheers!

reddit.com
u/Head_Goal_9777 — 9 days ago
▲ 64 r/FractalDesign+1 crossposts

Fractal Terra build

Asus TUF 9070 XT 330 mm
Ryzen 7 7700 (65 W) paired with a Cryorig C5 CU cooler
Minor case modifications are needed to accommodate the GPU
Ps i would not recommend the cryorig c5 it struggles to keep a 65w cpu cool

u/booztedroozter — 11 days ago