BUILD IT
Downsizing
Going to a slightly smaller ATX chassis
ZAK STOREY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY
THE CONCEPT
THIS LAST BUILD of mine itself. On the one hand, this is my personal machine. On the other, everything in it belongs to PRs and their respective companies and as such, by the time you read this issue, it will have returned in its entirety to the Maximum PC offices.
In many ways, the concept of this build is a moot point. After all, a typical transplant like this is usually undertaken because you intend to use the new chassis for some time, and are curious as to how it performs day-to-day. That said, as PC enthusiasts, as hobbyists, and as journalists, there’s a natural curiosity inside us that needs to be sated. It’s why we’re interested in building PCs to begin with. So, despite the short time I’d have with this build, I knew I had to check it out.
NZXT cases have long been a favorite at Maximum PC. The super-clean lines, and design language, combined with a strong price structure have cemented these cases as standout products. The only caveat has been access to cool air. Many years ago, we built an SLI’d system in this case’s forefather, the S340 Elite. It was a beast of a machine, beautiful to behold, and powerful beyond all measure. But give it a lengthy session in a graphically intense title, and after an hour or so, the processors started to throttle, and coolant temperature warnings popped up all over the place.
This has been an Achilles heel for NZXT ever since the company reinvented itself with the Manta line of chassis, so to see it ditch the clean smooth panels in favor of a bolder, airflow optimized style with the latest Flow chassis was, er, a breath of fresh air. So then, what’s the concept? If we take our personal computer and transplant it from the Corsair 5000D Airflow build, (complete with nine 120mm fans, 360mm premium AIO, and beefy RTX 3080), and move it into the smaller H510 Flow, would the design changes that NZXT implemented be enough to house all that power without throttling under its own heat? Seems simple enough.
CHANGES UPON CHANGES
AT THE HEART OF THIS SYSTEM lies a bit of a Frankenstein build, pieced together out of various parts from several builds that we created throughout the past year or so. The main bulk of that surrounds the Corsair 5000D 4K gaming PC we put together back in March 2021, albeit with a fair few changes on top.
The first big change comes in the form of the GPU. We dropped the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT for an MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Suprim X. Next up was the memory, we just weren’t having any luck with that 32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance Pro memory kit, so we swapped it for the special order 64GB (2x 32GB) kit of HyperX Predator DDR4 @ 3200 MT/s that we got in for our tiny NZXT H1 Editing PC back in September 2020. And lastly, we dropped down to a single M.2 drive in the form of the PCIe 3.0 Corsair Force MP400 2TB SSD. By no means a super-speedy drive, compared with the best PCIe 4.0 has to offer, but for our day-to-day use with this machine, it has more than enough storage and performance for everything we do. Aside from that, the motherboard, processor, case, power supply, and cooling were all identical to the 4K system (albeit we did add in one extra sleeved PCIe power cable from a separate Corsair kit for the power-hungry Suprim X GPU).