Am I wrong to air cool in a Phanteks Enthoo Evolve tempered glass case?

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Ripthruster

Ripthruster

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I am going to be changing out my case for my near future pc upgrade. I've been using a CM HAF 932 for my I7-2600K Sandybridge build and it is an amazing case for performance but is quite ugly. When I upgrade to Kabylake (or skylake if I cant wait that long) I'm going to use the Phanteks Enthoo Evolve case. It's strikingly beautiful and has good air flow. Had been leaning towards InWin 805 Infinity but most reviews give negative points for poor airflow despite its obvious good looks and quality.

http:// Phanteks Ethoo Evolve tempered glass

With this build I'm looking for performance, looks, and quiet. For the new CPU, I'd be ditching my Scythe Mugen 3 for either a Dark Rock Pro 3, Dark Rock 3, CoolerMaster master Airmaker, or Cryorig R1.
I was looking at liquid cooled solutions. I'm not sure I want to go the custom loop route and the AIO units all look so blah. The only exception was ID-cooling wich gets pretty good reviews especially for the price:

http:// id cooling frostflow

Only hesitation is there is no way to tell long term quality.
I know there are better air coolers than what I'm considering, but they are all near enough the top while still looking stylish. I couldn't stand looking at a Noctua type cooler despite being amazingly good.
What would you do? Is having a top mounted radiator too good a thing to pass up for a traditional air-cooled heatsink?
 
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synphul
Air cooling can be done in any case with decent airflow and it appears from the review done here that evolv with the tempered glass did pretty well.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phanteks-enthoo-evolv-atx-tempered-glass-mid-tower-case,4560-3.html

Personally I like the dark rock pro 3, it's the cooler I chose. It's really quiet, I've yet to hear it spin up to full speed unless I forced it to. I purposely set out to see what it would take to get the temps up enough to run the fans full speed. As it turns out I had the case panel off so I could hear the fans, turned all the case fans off and left them in place so they were blocking mainly the top vents and rear exhaust on my enthoo pro. Ran my 4690k oc'd to 4.6ghz on p95 v26.6 and...
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Ripthruster

Ripthruster

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I know skylake is out, I'm trying to wait for kabylake. I do a lot in VR with the Oculus rift. Especially Elite Dangerous which seems to tax my CPU some despite having a GTX1080. The case i'm looking at has full panel tempered glass on both sides so it's going to show everything, which means everything needs to look good. Kaby has been pushed to Q1 2017 so thats what I'm looking towards but constantly weighing whether it's enough of a jump over Skylake to bother waiting for. .
Either way, Every review and pic I see of this case has a liquid cooled setup which looks great. I just don't want the noise associated with most All in ones, as well as extreme cost of a custom looped system. I got the MSI GTX1080 recently and it's air cooled so I'm only looking to cool the CPU.

 
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synphul

synphul

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Mar 11, 2011
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Air cooling can be done in any case with decent airflow and it appears from the review done here that evolv with the tempered glass did pretty well.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phanteks-enthoo-evolv-atx-tempered-glass-mid-tower-case,4560-3.html

Personally I like the dark rock pro 3, it's the cooler I chose. It's really quiet, I've yet to hear it spin up to full speed unless I forced it to. I purposely set out to see what it would take to get the temps up enough to run the fans full speed. As it turns out I had the case panel off so I could hear the fans, turned all the case fans off and left them in place so they were blocking mainly the top vents and rear exhaust on my enthoo pro. Ran my 4690k oc'd to 4.6ghz on p95 v26.6 and finally got the cooler fans to spin up to 100% where I could hear them. My ambient temps were around 26-27c.

Under conditions less than ideal, no case ventilation/fans running, somewhat warm ambient temps and a stress test pushing harder than typical software does my cpu didn't overheat. No one is likely to run their pc in a setting that poor, once the case fans are on the cooler fans died back down.

Just be sure to watch the height of ram, the drp3 covers all 4 slots on my z97 board. Ripjaws x ram work out fine, fit just beneath it, for ddr4 on skylake you'll probably want something lower profile like ripjaws 4 vs trident z as an example. Ram like corsair vengeance or dominator are far too tall while the vengeance lpx (low profile) would work. It's not just an issue with the dark rock cooler, same goes with noctua and others. I think the cryorig r1 universal is designed to avoid ram conflict but that's the exception and not the rule with larger air coolers.
 
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