The case is the coolermaster haf xb evo. It is still available for sale around the web. I am very happy with it because it fits quite a lot of hardware in a small package, it also mounts the motherboard horizontal instead of vertical which means there is no gpu sag to worry about.
I used to love tower cases, but after spending many years with both tower and desktop styles, i’m pretty sure i prefer desktop case styles that mount the motherboard horizontally.
I have the fans set at around 74% for the whole system, they never really speed up much, except during very hot days in the summer while I am stressing the system, and even then they never go to max speed. Overall the pc is pretty quiet. There are a LOT of fans in that case however, so you will want to fiddle with the fan curves till you get them where you are happy with them. Since I wear closed-back style headphones all the time, I never really notice fan noise even when they speed up. All the case fans are Noctua fans, and I picked the ones that advertised quiet operation.
If you want to see how the whole thing fits together, check out the pictures I linked to at the bottom of my earlier post.
It is true, the heat sink is very large and blocks certain things, (mostly ram slots) So if I wanted to replace the ram I would have to take off the heat sink. That’s why I got 64gb to begin with. I strongly doubt i’ll ever want to replace the ram. Also i wanted 3600 cl16,16,16, 36 memory - to sync up with the 5950x for maximum performance. There are no kits available that run at that speed in larger kit sizes. So if I did replace the ram, I would be losing processor performance from being required to use a slower speed kit.
There is a whole ‘thing’ with the 5000 series of the zen processors, they really do get a decent performance bump from being matched with specific ram speeds. 3600 cl 16, 16, 16, 36 is one of those ‘sweet spots’. - as long as you remember to turn DOCP on (that’s the amd version of XMP). - there are some 3600 cl 16 kits in larger sizes, but they are not the cl 16, 16, 16, 36 that i was looking for… yeah I might have been overly picky. But I can say the system is very very fast.
What I really like about Air Coolers is they don’t require regular maintenance. I like to build my pc’s so I don’t have to fiddle with them much. Likely I could leave that pc alone for 10 years and it will still be chugging along just fine. Might need to blow the dust out after that, but it would still work.
Sadly - water cooling setups need regular maintenance, even in an entirely closed system, the water can sublimate through the walls of plastic and rubber-style pipes, eventually drying out, among other things, and that requires monitoring the pc, and possibly pulling it apart every few years to jiggery pokey the water system.
Air coolers are more ‘fire and forget’. They just keep working unless the fan dies, and even then you are likely still fine. Less potential points of failure on a big finned block of metal.