First time building a computer, but everything went fairly well.

Case- NZXT cases are so easy to work in. The back panel design makes it easy to fit all of you cables even if your cable management is not that great. Quality Steel construction with thumb screws that stay attached to the case. This includes the tempered glass panel, back panel ssd tray, and front fan tray mount. This was super convenient having less screws to manage as a newbie. I love the fact that I can side mount an ssd to the power shroud as well. Please note there is place to mount a hard drive inside the shroud, but there is no drive bay with trays. There also wasn’t much room for a Corsair commander pro therefore I used two drive trays from my old case and created a frame around my HDD to mount the commander pro. I just flipped the one of the trays upside down and zip tied it to the bottom one and used m3 tape strips to mount the commander pro on top of the frame to leave space between the HDD and the commander pro for heat dissipation. (Commander pro can get warm) Lastly, the HDD mounting location is adjustable using slots in the bottom of the case shroud from front to back. I would suggest mountings the HDD and commander pro close to the front of the case as you can. (What I should have done with commander pro)

CPU: This was a carry over from my old computer. Great cpu for being 2nd gen but is showing it’s age with ram memory clocking limitations. I could only clock my ram to 2955MHz. I might have been able to get it to 3200 MHz by messing with the timings, but everything runs fine and is stable at that speed. I tried over clocking the CPU to 4025 GHz, but it became unstable. I am not sure why, but again it runs everything I need perfectly fine at stock. If I was buying a cpu for this build I would have gone with 3700x.

Mother board: As great a value for this B-450 board is there are some issues. The board randomly stopped recognizing the top two sata ports therefore forcing me to use the two crammed in between the gpu and the ram. Might be some pathing issues. I would have gone with an M.2, but One of the reasons I bought this case was to mount an ssd on the side of the shroud. Also, there is no cmos reset button on this board although the pins are conveniently places on the edge of the board. Lastly, there is only one usb 2.0 header. Luckly, since I had the commander pro, I had two added usb 2.0 headers. Overall, the board is good quality and is aesthetically pleasing. This board has one cpu fan header and two system fan headers which is nice if your not going the Corsair route like me.

CPU cooler: What else is there to say? Noctua is so good! The chronomax black was the exacted look I wanted. I went with the smaller single heat sink for space conservation. Plus, the single heat sink allowed me to add an Corsair 120mm QL RGB fan by moving the noctua 120 mm fan to the other side of the heat sink for a push pull configuration. CPU temps are 8 degrees cooler from the wraith max cooler that came with the 2700x . I used a noctua extension cable and splitter to plug the noctua fan and Corsair fan into the cpu fan header. (More on RGB and overall fan setup later) Also, a Chronomax heatsink cover will fit with 1mm to spare :). I spray painted the white insert Krylon’s deep grey. Perfect color match to the Asia Horse cable extensions.

RAM: The G. Skill trident RGB is great memory, but again this was a carry over from my old pc. As previously mentioned, i was not able to utilize the 3600 MHz speed due cpu constraints. I will swap out the ram for Corsair when I upgrade my cpu.

Storage: I went with a western digital blue ssd for two reasons. One, the quality for the price is great, and I could remove the sticker since it would be mounted on the side of the case and be visible. The HDD was from my old computer.

GPU: Another carry over from old pc. Great card that can run most AAA games at 1440P at 60 FPS. This gpu can be overclocked quite a bit using MSI afterburner. If I was buying new I would have gone with a RTX 2080 SUPER.

Power supply: I went with sfx for more room to work with inside the shroud.

Fans: This fan setup was probably overkill, but I wanted to be able to control all the RGB, and the case fan speeds in the I-cue software. This was accomplished using a Corsair commander pro, and a lighting node core. Commander pro plugs into the 2.0 usb header on the MB and requires sata power. This is now your PWM fan control for all CASE FANS, not the two on the cpu cooler. I then plugged the lighting node core into one of two usb 2.0‘s on the commander pro. The lighting node core needs sata power as well. The Corsair QL’s are awesome fans with great RGB and quality construction. The two 140mm QL fans at the front of the case are set to intake. The 120mm QL fans at the rear and top are set to exhaust. The amount of cool air flow from the two front mounted 140s is impressive. This case does accommodate two 120mm fans at the front as well, but I wanted maximum fresh air intake. I was able to set reasonable fan curves between the cpu cooler fans and the case fans. You can use the bios for the cpu cooler fans and the I-cue software for the case fans. I set my cpu fans to 50% at 50 degrees as my base threshold for the ramp up. This prevented the constant ramping up and down of the fans. I set my case fans at the same % and temp, but I based it on the gpu temp instead of the cpu temp. This is because my cpu temps never get high enough during gaming, thank you noctua, at the 50 threshold. You could probably get by setting the fans at 40% at 50 degrees to get it quieter but the noise level is good for me. I will also be adding a DBZ themed gpu backplate, by v tech, that can plug into the commander pro.