Users should take a look at the printed manual to get some idea of what should expect from the Pure Base 501 series. All side panels are easily removed and for our build, we also installed three additional Pure Wings 3 140mm PWM fans at the top and front area, with orientation to supply more fresh air for the case. You will need a 4-pin splitter to power all the extra fans so take care. The PSU area is large and fits the be quiet! Straight Power 1000Watt without any issues. However all cables need to pass through the HDD cage, so if you use both 3.5" HDDs, you might face some issues with cable management. Passing the cables to the motherboard does require some extra effort since while there are many openings for the front of the case, the space is limited. The NVIDIA 4090 was installed without many issues, some space was also present till the front, nice one. There is no extra support for such big and heavy VGAs, so make sure you use some VGA holders to avoid graphic cards bending. Installing the be quiet! Rock Elite was easy, even we had it pre-installed on the motherboard and installed it with it on. Side panels closing is ok, no issues here as well. Below you can see several photos of a ready-installed system:

We performed several thermal tests to see how the build would perform with the following test system.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (Retail)
• CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Elite
• Case Fans: 2 X 140mm Pure Wings 3 PWM front, 2 X 140mm Pure Wings 3 PWM top, 1 X 140mm Pure Wings 3 PWM (back)
• Thermal Paste: Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound
• Motherboard: Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI with 2403 BIOS
• Memory: 2x32GB G.Skill DDR5-6000 CL30 (EXPO Profile)
• PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 1000Watt
• Main Storage: Samsung 980Pro 1TB
• VGA: MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X 24G
• Operating system: Windows 11 x64 + latest motherboard/AMD chipset drivers installed (DirectStorage enabled drive)
• Software: OCCT Enterprise Edition (2 sec interval monitor)
• Ambient room temperature ~ 24 Celsius (with AC climate control) - Environment Temperature measurements: Precision Gold N09AQ Envirometer Meter

Since we had more Pure Wings 3 140mm PWM Edition fans in our labs, we maxed out the configuration of the Pure Base 501 Airflow model, installing apart from the two (2) pre-installed 140mm fans, three more, making a total of 5 X 140mm Pure Wings 3 PWM fans. We hoped that this configuration would be enough to cool down our AMD 7950X with an NVIDIA 4090 GPU in such a small PC case.

We did set our own fan curve at the Asus Armoury Crate software to reduce noise levels. Below is the fan curve of the Dark Rock Elite CPU Fan:

while, the pre-installed Pure Wings 3 140mm PWM edition were controlled as follows

We performed our tests with cTDP ~ 222Watt (via PBO at auto), while we set the following voltages for all tests.

• CPU Core Voltage: Auto
• CPU SOC Voltage: 1.25V
• CPU VDDIO / MC Voltage: Auto
• Misc Voltage: 1.10V

Below are the test results after running the OCCT combine tests (CPU + 3D Standard) for 15 minutes. We didn't notice any thermal bottleneck during our testing:

The above tests showed a very good overall performance of the tested system, despite the small PC case dimensions and the use of a monster GPU/CPU combination with air cooling. We feel that this case will be better benefited from air cooling than AIO water cooling. We can see a small drop in the average CPU clock speeds when both CPU+GPU max out, which means the system is slightly affected and will drop down at the end, but only 200MHz at our tests. With normal use (gaming) your system will not slow down since will not get both CPU+GPU at 100% all the time, giving time to cool down the internals.