PC Master Race

If you’re worried about cooling, might I suggest going SFF?

That may sound confusing, but hear me out. With a small case, you can duct the CPU and GPU to the outside vents, so they only suck in ambient temp outside air instead of looping it around the case, or rolling dice+burning cash with AIO liquid.

I seal my CPU/GPU against the outside vent with some weather stripping. FYI this is a 420W Nvidia 3090 + AMD 7800X3D:

Since there are no case fans, it’s dead silent when idle, and quiet under load. It’s always cool, even in summer.

Also, the ability to just stick your desktop in carry-on luggage or a backpack is nice!

On that note, I’d also highly recommend a 7800X3D instead of a 9700X. In applications that like it (like games or AV1 encoding), that big L3 is really something to behold, and it’s ridiculously cool and power-efficient compared to the non-X3D chips. It’s also significantly less than $300 on sale.

I’d only lean towards the 9700X if code compiling or local hybrid LLM inference is your primary workload.

As another point of feedback, you don’t really need 850W unless you plant to go dual GPU, or 5090 I guess. But even with a 5090, it’s better to just undervolt and throttle the thing.

…Yes; I got an 850W. But only because of a firesale, heh. I’d much rather have a 650W platinum in its place.

For a 9700X, even with overclocking you could get away with an air cooler. I use a BeQuiet! Pure Rock 3 on my 7800X3D and it works great.

The biggest issue with those all-in-one liquid coolers is that they've got a lot of moving parts, which means they'll always break more quickly than an simple fan+heatsink setup. If you want this thing to last a long time, air coolers are better. Also, good air coolers are about on-par with good AIO setups except at the extreme top-end.

• Cooler:

Instead of Deepcool, I'd look at Thermalright. They have options that are cheaper yet perform better, including 360mm liquid coolers.

As for the Arctic Freezer, it's going to be an overkill, but having a nearly silent build is nice. Do be aware that it's much easier to mess up a liquid cooler installation than air. Essentially, always put screws through fans first (otherwise you'll damage the radiator) and never tighten them (otherwise, you'll strip the threading, even with hands), if they hold the fans, that's enough tightness. Except for the CPU screws, those are the same as with Air coolers.

Overall, for your first build, I'd recommend going for an Air cooler and only then switching to liquid if you feel it's needed. Temperature-wise you should be fine with either, 9700x isn't that power hungry, and something like Thermalright PA 120 was doing just fine with my 5900x (although in a colder climate)

• PSU:

Don't know about this MSI model, but I can recommend Xpg Core Reactor II 850W. There's also a II VE version, but it's a bit worse. Should be roughly the same price, but I can guarantee that this one is very reliable.

Also, always check in with the PSU Tier list from ZTT. With this build I recommend going for tier B or higher. The XPG II one is the highest tier.

• Bottlenecks and such

It's a balanced build, nothing else to say. Good job picking the parts. I personally may have gone for a CPU like 7800x3d, but that depends solely on your needs.

from my personal experience: don't buy anything from dell, psu check from psu tier list or just get a seasonic, with amd gpus go with something amd specific like sapphire because their coolers are not just nvidia ones slapped on the amd chip. my sapphire 9070 xt is amazing, literally never makes any sound no matter how hard i push it. and msi mobos are painful to set up for linux, took hours to install for a friend because there were some weird settings locking up for windows

Oh man, last year a 3k machine would've had a lot more ram than that.

I understand that (good) AIOs are pretty bulletproof these days. I can't tell if you need one though.