PRO tip needed - future build planning

[Winst0n]

Hi everyone, 

I'm going to build my first ever build real soon, i have everything picked out already, but there is still  some minute details I wonder about....

So first, here are the relevant specs : 

P500A DRGB case ( comes with 3 140 front fans pre-installed)

360 Arctic LFII

x570 Aurous Elite 

3080 

Ryzen 5900x

2 Samsung M.2 ( I panicked when the shortage started and bought 2 )

I'm going to leave the front fans as they are, put the AIO on top; and install a rear 120 arctic fan. 

 

I have a couple of questions so I would love it if you answer separately to each one, so bear with me.

 1. when it comes it thermals, is this the optimal setup?

 2. Is this setup considered balanced pressure or negative? should I be worried about dust? and if so what can I do the to avoid the problem without sacrificing cooling pref

 3. I have one 980 pro SSD and 970 Evo plus, I think that my motherboard only comes with a thermal guard(I guess that's how its called?)  for SSDs, I'm thinking about placing the 980 with thermal guard in the slot closest to the CPU for pref, which leaves the 970 bare and under the mercy of the scorching hot 3080, should I be worried about it thermal throttling ? 

4. I believe ill be hoking 7 fans overall with the help of splitters to three fan headers, should i be worried about my board shorting because of too much fans ?  ( stupid que I know)

5. I need this build for both gaming and productivity, so I was torn between this case and the lancool ii mesh, and although according to Steve's video its 5 degrees lower in CPU torture test, I just liked the p500a more looks-wise and feature-wise.

knowing that I do not plan to overclock in the future, is the better temps really worth it ? specially when the  p500a already has good temps

 

If you have read this far, thank you so much!   

 

 

 

 

 

[BluDYT]

you could use the three preinstalled 140s as intake in the front and your rad as exhaust through the top. id say if you got spare cash grab a 120 for the rear but temps should be fine regardless. your SSD would maybe thermal throttle but only at continuous high loads I'm sure you wouldn't even notice a performance drop though. 

you shouldn't have an issue with fan splitters but to be safe I wouldn't use more than 3 or 4 on a single header. if you don't plan to over clock you could always under volt and drop the temp even more but you don't really have anything to worry about here even if you don't. 

[Chris Pratt]

1. Yes. AIO as top mounted exhaust is generally the best config for the system as a whole if you can fit it. 

 

2. It's going to be mostly balanced pressure. It's hard to really say without actually measuring the conditions inside the case with special equipment, because fan curves and such can tilt it one way or another depending on how hard the system is working, but generally, you'll have three 140mm intake, three 120mm exhaust, and then an extra 120mm exhaust. However, the rad blocks some of the airflow for the exhaust, so the extra exhaust fan is likely canceled out. It's going to be balanced or slightly positive, but that's fine either way. It's probably as good as you're going to get without bringing an actual scientific process into it.

 

3. It's called a heatsink. Out of the two, the PCIe 4.0 drive needs it more. However, neither *really* needs it unless you're doing a ton of writes over an extended period of time. As soon as you stop writing any heat build up will dissipate pretty quickly, so if it's just normal bursty drive usage, it will basically never heat up a significant amount. You can always buy an M.2 heatsink separately for the other drive if you want.

 

4. No. As long as you don't put too many fans on any one header, but 2-3 per header is fine in almost all scenarios.

 

5. It won't make that much of a difference. Things like your CPU cooler matter far more.

 

Also, FWIW, not OCing it is fine, but you should definitely consider undervolting it. It's trivially easy with the new curve optimizer, and it's just free performance. I got my 5900X to 4.6MHz all core and 4.95GHz single core just doing a -30 step all core undervolt. Messing around with PBO limits, I got it to 4.7-4.8 all core and 5.1 single core. You don't have to go that far, though. Just doing the undervolt adds a good 100-200MHz or so to your clocks across the board and uses less power and generates less heat as well. Win all around.