This was my 2nd Ryzen 1600 build and I was planning on adding a Sapphire Nitro+ Special Edition RX 590. I had it all put together and began stress testing. Running Kombustor to stress the GPU sent my CPU idle temp to 70 C.

Uh oh.

This was the first warning that something may be wrong. Stressing the CPU sent it to 85 C immediately and I shut down the tests before anything got too scary. I rearranged the fans, but no effect. I undervolted the CPU and GPU, but still couldn't get reasonable temps. I inspected the front acrylic panel and realized that the air inlets are even smaller than they appear. The airflow of this case is actually abysmal I knew the RX 590 would push the thermals of this build, but didn't realize it would be unusable.

Looking at specs, the RX 590 has a TDP of 225W, just slightly less than the 250W of an RTX 2080 - a card that is 88% faster. AMD seems to have rightly earned its reputation of combining GPUs and space heaters.

Ok, so the conclusion is that this Cooler Master case has terrible airflow, and the RX 590 is going to need some more fresh air - in a future build.

I ended up getting an RX 570 from prime, and sticking it in. It still gets warm, but I can have a reasonable CPU overclock.

- Bonus lesson: this PC wasn't stable with the VDDR at 1.4V. I would get random reboots. XMP at 1.35V was fine, but simply increasing this to what should be a safe 1.4V caused crashes. I haven't seen this behavior before and may be a property of the RAM. I think this was Micron B-die, but I don't remember at the time of this writing.