Help with Prebuilt - New to PC

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It's not about overheating in a case, as much as the components' (CPU and GPU) boost mechanics. The cooler they are, the faster they go. They don't run at a fixed level upto the maximum safe temp and then suddenly drop off.

For Ryzen CPUs, every 5 degrees or so apparently they lose a chunk of frequency.
You can see almost a couple hundred MHz difference between 75 degrees and 50 degrees

With Nvidia GPUs, they try to boost themselves beyond the rated boost frequency, but drop some of that extra frequency as the temp increases, with multiple steps. So my RTX 2060 has a rated boost clock of 1830 MHz. When gaming it will typically go to 1920MHz. When running Folding@home with another GPU also in the case, it will be able to sustain boost clocks of around 1905MHz as it hits ~70 degrees. Taking the side panel off the case sees that rise to 1935, over 100MHz above the rated boost clock. Because it gets more fresh air to cool itself, and temps are kept lower (~65 degrees).

So while most cases don't cause thermal throttling in the 'old' sense, modern components will generally try to boost themselves as far as they can while there is still the thermal and power headroom to allow it.

Thus decent airflow is needed to 'unlock' the performance that those components want to give :)
 
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1. Phanteks Evolv X - silver would go great with my set up
2. Phanteks Eclipse p400a (fitting issue?)
3. Fractal design meshify s2
4. Cooler master H500p

Any of those seem like solid choices. Does the Meshify S2 come in white? I wasn't sure it did :)

Edit: Apparently it does, my earlier google-fu was inadequate!

The P400A is fine, you'd apparently just need to put the radiator at the front, and presumably move the 2 front fans you removed up top.
 
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Zoid

Community Contributor
The Phanteks Evolv X looks great and am leaning towards that one currently if I can find it in stock. I'm down to 4 lol. Sorry for the all the back and forth guys, but I do appreciate your help! Quick thoughts here and I'll go ahead and order

1. Phanteks Evolv X - silver would go great with my set up
2. Phanteks Eclipse p400a (fitting issue?)
3. Fractal design meshify s2
4. Cooler master H500p
Any of these will be fine, and I believe the Meshify S2 does come in a white trim.

As important as thermal performance is, aesthetics do also play a role since you'll be looking at this thing for the next several years. If you're leaning towards the Evolv X then maybe that's the way to go. It's a great looking case and has reasonable thermal performance to back up the looks.
 

Zoid

Community Contributor
Ended up going with the Evolv - I'm a sucker for fancy looking things . Thank you all for all of the help! Excited to get everything together.
Awesome! :) Share some photos of the build with us! And when building your first PC, no question is a dumb question, so ask away if you have them. We're always happy to welcome someone else into the computer building community.
 

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