Counter argument:

• It’s kinda fun

Great choice! It’s not as crucial as one might think to keep temperatures low, and while gaming you’re not very likely to see max temperatures. There’s a fail safe on intel CPUs at 100c (sometimes 105c), at which point they will turn themselves off to prevent damage. But really unless it makes your room uncomfortably warm, all the temperature between your current and the max of 100c can be seen as performance headroom where there’s space to squeeze out higher clock speeds. Though you won’t be getting into overlocking so not really anything you can squeeze yourself, but with “K” branded intel processors like 12600K you could.

I would however guess that you’ll be gaming comfortably around 60-80c, and mostly only see 90c+ temperatures while rendering or doing any extended high CPU workload.

Highly suggest Fan Control and Open Hardware Monitor, for controlling fans and monitoring sensors respectively :]

I agree with the other poster to go for 32gb RAM over 16, especially when the RAM prices are quite low right now. Any particular reason you’d like to go with ddr5 over ddr4? You can get a lot cheaper components going for a previous year ddr4 motherboard and ram and not really lose out on any performance, and I’d definitely suggest looking over it :]

And as for graphics card, with the way modern games are heading GPU VRAM is turning into a more important spec every year. So a 12gb 3060 or a 6700XT is not a bad choice. I can imagine you’d get better blender performance and compatibility with an Nvidia GPU though (haven’t checked but usually the way it goes with professional applications.) With this said any other card with over 10gb that you can find I’m sure you’ll be happy with, even better if you can find one used and save a bit.

Check the CPU cooler for compatibility in the specifications, and basically if it’s listed then it’s compatible and it’ll have the necessary brackets and things to install it.

Other general suggestions:

• pcpartpicker is a really great site to list, compare, find other builds and put together lists of components.
• I’m a big fan of Fractal Design cases, they’re fairly affordable, clean design and easy to build in and have some mesh/steel options like the Meshify.

Happy building, let us know how it goes!