This is true! It’s also why I ended up with the full size Torrent, since I was able to get my hands on a 4090 last month. My teenage daughter, who is not getting anything resembling a 4090 in the near term, is now the proud owner of the Compact.
Here’s my full size torrent: (🤦♂️, I actually blur-tooled the mess of wires behind the case)
On pcpartpicker.com I’m seeing some nice designs in a Fractal Meshify 2 that @LockerK referenced which accommodate a 240 AiO and a 4090. Also the Lian Li 011 Dynamic Evo, also suggested by a few folks above. But all of them are top mounted AiO setups.
The Phanteks Eclipse series of cases can accommodate a radiator up to 420mm front or 360mm top. The G500A is the new one, replaced the P500A. They sell a fanless version too, if you intend to BYO case fans.
I have a P600S which I love. It has some different features, but the same internal layout as the *500A cases. Prices on the P600S have crept up since I bought it though, it’s sitting at $200+ now.
Thanks so much for these brilliant suggestions. Thanks to @mono, I’ve become sort of obsessed with the concept of airflow through the case, and looking at the ways my current ancient case is lacking on that. What I’m especially appreciative of is that it’s helped to really focus and guide my research on a topic in pc building that I’ve sort of willfully ignored for a decade.
So right now, the leaders at the turn are the Fractal Torrent full-size, and that Phanteks G-500A DRGB that @J_Thomas just posted about.
Oh, and thanks for posting a pic of your own case, mono! I keep hearing so much “Oh my god, it’s so big” exclamations about that Noctua air CPU cooler that I was getting a bit scared of it, but that gives a good sense of scale.
BTW, because of the airflow discussions and going down that rabbit hole, I took a look at my current case, which has a 180mm fan at the front (sitting below an HDD/physical media drive cage, so it’s only got free flow to the bottom half of the case), a 120mm fan at the rear, and a 240mm radiator fan up top that’s part of an AIO cpu cooler.
And, uh, I realized that 6 or 7 years ago when I replaced the 180mm fan on the front of the case, I…um… OK. No laughing. I may have faced it the wrong direction, so that every fan on the case was blowing outward, as exhaust fans. Don’t look at me, I’m hideous.
So I gave the fan and the dusty filter in front of it a good cleaning and turned it around so that it’s now a 180mm intake fan, and temps inside the case and the GPU at idle are like 8-10 degrees cooler than they were previously.
(It’s still an ugly case that I’m going to replace, but I’m much less worried about melting my components when I play Cyberpunk now until I get a new case hooked up.)
Yeah, FWIW I had a Noctua DH-15S with a second fan on my 12900K and it ran 10-15C cooler than the crap 120mm AIO I replaced it with. No fit issues with a full-size case, and the DH-15S has enough clearance for tall chipset heatsinks and RAM.
I have just a Noctua 12S on my 12600K and it’s great. I always recommend Noctua unless you cannot fit a quality air cooler in your case. Be sure to check the Noctua website for mobo compatibility (famously, ROG Strix Z690 boards won’t quite work with some Noctua coolers due to aggressive VRM heatsinks). Also check your case specs to ensure you have clearance for your chosen cooler. Fractal is really good about posting all the CPU cooler and GPU clearances on its website. It shouldn’t be a problem for most noncompact cases, but it’s always good to make sure. I think the 12S fit in my Meshify 2 Compact with about 10mm to spare.
Let’s say you did something like the Phanteks G500 case, with the 3x140mm intake fans in the front, and a 140mm exhaust fan in the back, and a Noctua air cooler on the cpu.
That leaves the top of the case, which is traditionally where you’d maybe put a radiator and 3x120mm exhaust fans for a CPU cooler. Which in this case, not using.
So would you use that mesh space at the top for:
Nothing (possibly reserving it for a GPU radiator and fans in the future), or
Concur, I would leave the top mesh as passive exhaust for the rising warm air without fans. You generally want more active intake fan airflow than your exhaust fan airflow so that the air gets sucked in through the filter in front of your intakes and minimizes dust inside your case. If your active exhaust outpowers your active intakes, it will start sucking air and dust through every exterior crevice of your case instead.
Do those of you who build and consider yourselves to be good at cable management (and by pics I’ve seen in this thread and others of folks’s rigs, you all are good at cable management) find yourselves getting by just fine with the stock 24-pin motherboard connector and the 8 pin cpu connector lengths? Or do you use extenders?
(From the age of my existing case, cable management is at best ad-hoc chaos, but I’d love to be able to use modern case cable solutions that run those power cables behind the motherboard, etc.)
I think stock lengths are longer than they used to be so they can often be run along longer ‘out of sight’ paths but this will be very much down to the brand of PSU. I probably wouldn’t worry about it until you get there?
That said, I’ve been on SFF for the past 2 builds and my problem is the opposite - cables are way too damn long and I’m considering buying something shorter…
