Downsizing
ZAC STOREY Zac is pretty good at building PCs and enjoys nothing more than a problem with no apparent solution.
Nzxt cases have long been a favorite at APC. 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-ed 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 favour of a bolder, airflow optimised 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
