New case and cooler recommendations?

Let's find one. 😁 This time I actually want a decent case, not this cheap junk where everything just runs hot.

Three should be plenty—two in the front and one in the rear to help out the CPU cooler. Four fans is probably the sweet spot; five just seems overkill and might actually mess up your Corsair.

The Noctua setup comes with one rear fan, two on top, and one in the front, leaving you with an extra slot up front. I guess you could just move one of those top ones to the front and call it a day.

Yeah, I ended up setting mine up the exact same way—two fans in the front and one in the back. Everything flows perfectly through the Corsair LL120, which I also have oriented in the same direction.

Alright, finally got this rig put together... It’s nothing to write home about, honestly, but it'll do the job for now. I'm gonna go check out the temps and I'll catch you guys later.

Mission accomplished! Temps are finally back to normal.

Trying to breathe some life back into this thread (not sure where else to dump this question...)

So, I'm rocking a Corsair case. According to their official site, the airflow is supposed to come in through the front and side, then vent out the back. Since my goal is to get some negative pressure inside, I’m stuck on how to actually pull that off. The rear exhaust only has room for an 80mm fan (the one that came with the case). How should I set up the other fans—front and side—without creating positive pressure? Would it work if I put an extra exhaust fan on the side and kept the front as intake...?

Specs: I've got an Intel Core i7-4771 on an ASUS Z87 Motherboard, paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, a 120 GB SSD, a 500 GB HDD, a 1 TB HDD, 2x 4GB RAM, and an EVGA 750W PSU. Temps look decent while gaming (CPU stays around 50-52 °C for now), but my GPU is hitting 65-68 °C regularly, especially when playing Alan Wake on HIGH settings. It runs buttery smooth, but I feel like the card is running way too hot. Would switching to a better thermal paste help drop those temps at all? Any suggestions on which one to grab...

65°C is actually pretty chilly for a GPU; I wouldn't sweat it unless you see it creeping past 90 😉

The whole point of side intake is to give the graphics card some breathing room, but since your other components aren't running hot, I guess adding one more 120mm fan up front should be plenty.

For example,

I've already got a 120mm setup in the front... It's honestly weird how they designed this thing—giving you all these options for intake fans while the exhaust is basically pathetic. Is my current setup (a 120 in the front and an 80 in the back) actually providing decent airflow? It would’ve made way more sense if both were 120mm. I'm even considering a DIY mod to cut out the top panel so I can drop in an extra fan... the top gets pretty hot when I'm gaming, and heat rises, right? Some Corsair cases come with those vents straight from the factory, and now I'm kicking myself for not grabbing one of those. But then again, I hate the idea of hacking away at this case since it's brand new...

Thanks for the input, crimsonstag84. For now, I guess the temps are fine, but I'm really wondering what's gonna happen once summer hits...

Negative pressure? Why on earth would you even want that? It’s much more logical to force air into the case to keep dust buildup at bay, especially since air will naturally find its way out through any weaker exhaust fans at the back anyway. 😁
As for those temperatures, they look absolutely fantastic; honestly, you won't have a single thing to worry about once summer hits. If you just pull up some software like MSI Afterburner to manage your GPU fans, you can easily tweak your own custom fan curve or simply stick to the factory defaults—which, in silent mode, usually allow the GPU to hit its maximum safe operating temperature, say around 83°C, before ramping things up.

You're kidding me, those temps are absolutely fantastic!

Alright, you guys actually managed to calm me down! 😁

I haven't really been obsessing over the temps in detail, which is why I was asking so many questions...

The only thing I've noticed is that AutoCAD pushes my CPU temps up pretty high (hitting 70°C) when I'm rendering on high settings. I read somewhere that this is a common issue with AutoCAD. Luckily, I rarely actually hit render; I mostly just do 3D modeling. That software hammers the processor while barely touching the GPU, whereas the graphics card helps out a bit when I'm messing around with the 3D model—like rotating an entire house or whatever—and everything runs fine there. I guess because of how those specific programs work, there are actual workstations designed to handle that kind of load better...

Another test I ran that I'm really happy with was stitching 280 photos into a panorama (gigapan). My CPU temps didn't even cross 52°. Opening and processing a massive batch of photos at once in Adobe Camera RAW also went super smoothly with low temps.

So basically, everything is fine and I totally overreacted... 🤦

Thanks for all the input, everyone!

Look, an i7 Haswell under a heavy stress test (rendering is probably the closest thing you'll see to real-world load) hits nearly 100°C when you're just using the stock cooler click!!! So, that 70°C maximum you're worried about? That's nothing. Just so you know, most overclocking tutorials consider anything north of 80°C to be "not recommended"—though that doesn't mean the chip is going to die if it crosses that line.

The i7-4790K—the "Devil's Canyon" (Haswell Refresh)—actually features slightly better thermal paste under the IHS compared to the original Haswell. Here are the temperatures we saw after overclocking it with a beastly Noctua cooler:

To start things off, our specific unit hit 4.5 GHz at 1.3V quite easily, which was exactly what we expected. It remained perfectly stable during extended OCCT stress tests, with total system power draw climbing to about 180W. Pushing further, we bumped the voltage to 1.35V and the multiplier to 47. This resulted in a clock speed of 4.7GHz, and the processor proved itself stable here as well, even though temperatures climbed up to 88°C. During this, we kept the VCCIN at 1.9V, the Ring voltage at 1.175V, and set the System Agent, I/O Analog, and I/O Digital voltages to +0.1V over nominal. The CPU even managed to wake up at 4.8 GHz; however, while it passed all the benchmarks, it failed the stability test after 25 minutes of OCCT. Therefore, the absolute stable OC frequency is 4.7GHz, making it objectively worse than our old 4770K, which reached 4.9GHz.

Bottom line: I really don't think you have a heating problem.

Sweet, another useful bit of info. Feeling way more chill now. 👍