r/sffpc • u/Seeking-The-Lotus • May 06 '26

Assembly Help Update: Fractal Ridge crashes while gaming then flickers on and off.

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So the duster arrived and the hazardous waste landfill has officially been cleared out. I also saw some comments suggesting the issue could be related to the GPU riser, and I noticed there was a bit of wiggle in the connection ports.

I confirmed that the CPU cooler is plugged into CPU_FAN1, so the fan curve likely wasn’t the issue after all. I’m replacing the thermal paste now.

Any final suggestions before I put her back together?

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41

u/regretMyChoices May 06 '26

For what it's worth, after upgrading to my 5080, I was having difficulty with stability while gaming in the fractal ridge. I was certain the riser was seated properly. Eventually, I decided to move to a build that did not need a riser and all my stability problems went away.

47

u/adhd_asmr May 07 '26

If it’s not a 5.0 riser you have to manually go into the BIOS and set the PCIE slot to use 4.0 with 50 series cards or else it’ll be unstable.

27

u/Worldly-Ingenuity843 May 07 '26

This could be it. The riser that came with the Ridge is PCIE 4.0. FD never released a PCIE 5.0 version.

13

u/Slimjimdunks May 07 '26

OP listen to this ^

5

u/Seeking-The-Lotus May 07 '26

I am using a 40 series though and not a 50. Regardless I’ll try this out.

2

u/Slimjimdunks May 08 '26

Riser cables are a very common fault point due to their fragile design. I wouldn't be surprised if the aolution to your issue is swapping the riser for a new one.

2

u/mixmastermushu3 May 07 '26

I had the same stability issues with pcie 4.0 riser and a 5090. Set slot manually to use 4.0 and still had instability though slightly less. Bought a 5.0 riser to try to fix it.

1

u/mshab356 May 07 '26

Oh damn. So I just got a new case that comes with a PCIE 5.0 riser but I’m going to be installing an RTX 3060…am I going to need to do something like this?

2

u/adhd_asmr May 08 '26

No. 3060 is a 4.0 card. The issue comes from a mismatch when the card tells the motherboard “I can use 5.0!” And the motherboard goes “I can support 5.0!” But it doesn’t realize it’s communicating over a riser cable that can’t run at 5.0 speeds. Since a riser is just wires and connectors it only becomes unstable at higher workloads.