New gaming/editing desktop specs and airflow advice

Fellow PC enthusiasts,

Thought I'd share the specs of the next build and the rationale behind some of them.

• New build or upgrade?
  • New build.
• Existing parts/monitors to reuse? (List with models/links)
  • Keeping the existing RTX 3080 GPU till Nvidia gets its act together and fixes the horrible driver issues. Keeping the existing monitors. Everything else will new new.
• PC purpose? (Gaming, editing, etc. List apps/games)
  • 4K gaming, VR, 4K video editing.
• Purchase country? Near Micro Center? (If not US, list local vendors)
  • Romania/Austria. Small parts like SSDs, CPUs and RAM can be bought in the states. Larger ones like cases or power supplies must be bought locally.
• Monitors needed? (Number, size, resolution, refresh rate)
  • No.
• Budget range? (Include tax considerations)
  • ~$3.5K.
• WiFi or wired connection?
  • Wired.
• Size/noise constraints?
  • Mini ITX, zero to low RPM preferred.
• Color/lighting preferences?
  • Nope.
• Any other specific needs?
  • Food, shelter, love.

​

CPU:         AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7GHz AM5
Cooling:     Corsair iCUE LINK Titan RGB RX AIO 360mm
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X870-I GAMING WIFI AM5 DDR5
RAM:         G.Skill Trident Z5 NEO 2x32GB DDR5 6000Mhz CL30
OS SSD:      Western Digital BLACK SN8100 1TB PCIe Gen5
Games SSD:   Crucial T500 2TB PCIe Gen4
Video SSD:   Kingston DC600M Enterprise 3D TLC 2.5" 7.68TB
PSU:         Corsair RM1000x 1000W Gold 14cm Fan Fully Modular ATX
Case:        Corsair 2500X iCUE LINK RGB Micro ATX + 4 Corsair RX120 MAX fans

Form factor: Going mini ITX this time, for aesthetic and spatial reasons, but also since I never actually used any of the those extra PCIE or DIMM slots on the previous ATX build and it feels a little wasteful, in terms of space and cost.

Storage: After going over way too many reviews, opinions, benchmarks, power consumption and heat generation charts, I decided on a 1TB WD SN8100 for the OS SSD as the closest thing to the ideal gen 5 NVMe on the market right now. For games, I added a 2TB Crucial T500. It's gen 4 but the second M.2 slot on this mobo only supports gen 4 anyway and the gen4/gen5 impact on game load times is still negligible, afaik . Lastly, an 8TB enterprise grade Kingston 2.5" SATA SSD for video and general storage.

Now, I can almost hear your thoughts through time and space as I'm typing this; "SATA?! in 2026?!". Humor me here. I don't mind that it'll be limited to 560/530 MB/s since it'll unlikely it'll be used for anything that'll saturate that. Probably not even half. It'll mostly be used for rendering, transcoding, stock media, video storage, image backups and such. I like this SSD mostly for the jaw dropping 14,016 TBW but also since it has hardware based power loss protection, which you usually only get with server SSDs. It seems satisfying to have PLP, even if you have the system on a beefy UPS, as another layer of protection. Redundancy is reassuring.

This seems like a much safer set up, long term, than getting an 8TB NVMe for games and video storage combined, which will most likely be around 4800 TBW. That's only about a third of the Kingston's 14,000! If a ~8TB enterprise grade NVMe existed that was reasonably priced and used M.2 instead of U.3, it would have been tempting, but I just don't see any options out there.

To paraphrase, I chose this drive to maximize longevity, trading speed for long term reliability. Theoretically. Statistically. OK, fine, it just gives me a lil' more peace of mind to see 3 times the TBW on hardware I expect to use on a nearly daily basis, hopefully for 6-8 years.

Another reason to lean towards SATA; it would allow adding a second drive and going RAID 0 in the future. Yay, more redundancy. This cannot be said for the NVMe path, as this board only has two M.2 slots and the first one will be used by the OS SSD.

Case and cooling: I'll mount the 360mm AiO at the top. The case comes with two 120mm Corsair iCUE Link fans. They'll be used as right side intake. The plan is to add 4 more Corsair RX120 MAX, three as intake on the bottom and one more on the back as exhaust. See hastily put together image for a fans and radiator mounting plan and intake/exhaust configuration. The newer "MAX" variant of the RX120 seems to have better performance that will allow for even lower RPM so might as well get that instead of the RX120.

It'll have more intake than exhaust, but that should be fine. Better than the other way around. Hopefully, this machine will spend most of it's lifetime with all fans at zero or very low RPM, including the AIO and the power supply. The plan is to optimize the fan curves and have all fans running at zero to a low RPM. As low as I can get away with while keeping temps in check.

This is the best looking mini ITX case, imo. The reviews are good and users seem to like it. I've also had good experience with Corsair's cases, cooling and iCUE ecosystem so far. The non RGB variant of this case would have been just fine, but it's nowhere to be found around here, so the RGB version it is. If I'm getting the RGB version, might as well spring for the nicer case fans *shakes fist at imaginary brilliant Corsair marketing people*.

I realize modern Noctua fans are better, with emphasis on quieter at the same RPM, but it sounds so appealing to have all the fans, including the AIO ones, with as few cables as possible between them. If only Noctua made an equivalent product. Daisy chaining fans like this seems like such a no brainer. I wonder if Corsair and Lian Li are the only companies to patent daisy chaining fans without cables and if they'll ever sue each other over it.

PSU: Again, wonderful past experiences with the Corsair RMx line and zero RPM mode sold me on this one. Could probably get by with 800W but going for 1000W to have more headroom in case of a future upgrade to a more demanding GPU and since all PSUs lose some watts as they age. The price difference is negligible.

Any thoughts, musings, suggestions, awards, accolades, criticism and ideas for alternatives or upgrades would be most welcome. Let the public scrutiny commence!