Fastest AMD PC – Hyte Y40
Building a PC with a Y40 Mid Tower Case
The mid tower case I chose to build my system around is the Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower. It's a great option for those who want to build a custom loop and don't need a huge amount of room for their components. The case has a unique design that allows it to be optimized for space, with most of the available space being utilized by the custom loop I built.
As you can see from the photo, the case is almost fully enclosed by the custom loop, which takes up almost all of the available room in the case. This mid tower actually looks kind of space-optimized and dense, as the only thing left to do was fill up the loop and get the system up and running.
I am very happy with the finished result. I mean if you want that kind of full glass fish tank aquarium look, like I like to call it, without stepping up to something like a Y60 or an O11, I think the height of this case is actually a pretty decent choice. Stand out for me though would have to be that metal tubing, especially with the lighting reflecting off of it. Just looks super super clean very very happy with how that turned out and actually not a look that I've had from one of my PC builds before.
Bleeding all of the air out of this custom loop and out of the reservoir was a pretty important step in the build process. It took quite a bit of time, but it's essential to ensure that there are no air bubbles in the system, which can cause issues with performance and longevity. I also forgot to buy some quick disconnect fittings, which would have made filling the loop up a lot easier. Instead, I used the usual method of switching the loop on and off, changing the pump speed to move all of the bubbles around, and also rotating and moving around the case.
Ideally, you'd come back to this sort of loop a week or so later and top it up again once the rest of those bubbles have found their way to the top. As with pretty much every PC build that I've done recently, I used fan control software to control the speed of all of the fans and the pump completely. The software is free and very easy to use, don't need any kind of special Fan Hub or anything like that. It's also nice that you can use the GPU as the temperature source and base the fan curves off of it.
That's the biggest Advantage here over just using your motherboard's bios. You can also change things on the fly without having to reboot, which allows for real-time tuning and optimization. With the setup I have here, I've got two side intake fans, two top exhaust fans, and a kind of bottom intake fan in the power supply chamber that comes default with the Y40. I don't really recommend cranking up this fan, as it just doesn't seem to do much.
Instead, I run the other four fans at around 1000 RPM, maybe even a touch lower than that. This seems to result in some pretty decent thermal performance. In Furmark, my 7900 XTX ran with a room ambient of 23 degrees Celsius, only reaching a maximum temperature of 70 degrees. The total board power was at 375 watts, and the memory junction temp was getting a little bit tooasty but nothing unreasonable.
The massive cooler on the 7900 XTX seems to be putting in some pretty decent work because it's a reasonably quiet setup. On the other hand, I can't see the same level of heat management with the Ryzen 7000 chips, especially the 3D V-Cash chips like the one that we have here. The heat management for these chips is just not great.
For example, with an Intel chip from 12th or 13th gen, on this cooling setup you can probably squeeze 250 watts maybe even 300 watts of kind of heat load out of the chip before it starts seeing any kind of thermal limit. But with the Ryzen 7950X 3D, it hits its thermal limit at only 160 Watts, so yeah, probably a really good idea that we didn't go with a top-mounted 360mm cooler setup or something more powerful because these chips just don't seem to scale.
As for gaming performance, I've done full reviews on both the 7950X 3D and the 7900 XTX, and those videos will give you a much better idea of what we're working with here. But in short, the 7900 XTX is very similar in performance to an RTX 4080, but when factoring in things like Ray tracing, AI upscaling, creative app support, and power consumption especially in Esports titles, I would recommend probably spending that extra hundred dollars or so for a 4080 or better. A 4090 if you really want the fastest system.
Overall, something a little bit different something a little bit fresh, like metal tubing was a great choice for this build. And the lighting reflecting off of it just makes everything look super clean and nice. I am very happy with how this build turned out, and I think it's going to be a great gaming PC for years to come.