I've seen some miniITX motherboards with a NVMe slot on the back, could temps be an issue for rear-mounted NVMe's? Is there enough space between the motherboard and the back of the case to keep a possible NVMe ssd cool?
That depends on your SSD and your use.
One thing is that we are kind of bound by ATX specs so there has to be at least 6,35 mm of clearance from the bottom while M.2 can take up to 5.4 mm if I remember correctly. We have 7 mm because of metric standoffs and 8 mm in the middle because of the cutout in the middle of piece holding those standoffs. If we were to make more space here, this would mean shrinking space for CPU cooler.
There is no airflow under the motherboard in Sentry, so essentially it's question whether you put so much load on your nvme SSD to overheat or not. If you do, then you can grab some aircraft paint remover and clear out the spot just below the nvme drive controller and put a thick thermal pad in between - this way you can dissipate the heat through the case itself. It won't be great cooling, but should be enough for such thing as nvme controller.
The memory modules on nvme drives themselves shouldn't be cooled though as those like to work in high temps as I recall.
I was also wondering if the AIO is required or if a low profile fan for the CPU could also do the trick.
That will obviously depend on your CPU. If you're okay with 65W TDP CPU, then something like R7 1700/2700, R5 1600/2600 or non-K intel CPUs should be okay with Noctua NH-L9i/a. Those Ryzen CPUs might also be okay even with wraith stealth with replaced fan - stock fan is really tall, check this to see what I'm talking about:
65W TDP intel CPUs should work okay with stock cooler, may work a bit better with copper core boxed cooler, but sadly it's not shipping with 95W CPUs anymore so those may run out from ebay at some point.
There should be 45W TDP ryzen chips coming as well, but there's no specific info on release date - the R5 2600E/R7 2700E. Intel also usually releases 45W and 35W TDP models - S & T variants. Those should work even better with low profile coolers or simply stock box coolers (intel).
The point of AIO liquid cooler is to be able to support 95W and hopefully 105W TDP CPUs because there are people who need more raw CPU power than the GPU and can accept the drawbacks of ITX-sized GPU to be able to cool the CPU in our chassis. There will also be people who simply want to put the top notch CPU in their rig.
So far I'm skeptical on support for 105W TDP CPUs like R7 2700X after seeing how it actually performs - okay, it can game, but when you put a full load like rendering on that, the temps skyrocket really fast. You should either go for R7 2700 which is 65W if you need those 8 cores or you can simply go for R5 2600X if you just want high clocks.
Would more chasis perforations lower the overall temps significantly or would that be too detrimental to the general sturdiness of the case? Are the current perforations based on performance or is it a design choice? (just curious about this one)
Perforation increase is obviously performance based choice. For first Sentry it wasn't enough for 95W TDP CPUs which quite a lot of users put inside, and we wanted to fix that issue.
There is of course slight reduce of rigidity on the perforation area, but corners and structural elements are still pretty sturdy. We have also cut down some material on the internal structure but we have taken it where it doesn't affect the case rigidity.
Do you have an estimate average price for the case?
That's a tough one at this point because we will have to get updated pricing on each supply - risers, cables, switches, screws etc.
We don't want to do that yet because suppliers give us good bulk prices when we initially talk to them, but if we get back to them after few months when we actually need to place order, they are pulling stuff like "steel and aluminium prices rose from last time we spoke - +25% unit price for you" because they feel that we have no time to waste on looking for another supplier.
It's probably going to be something between 200€ and 230€ and we're going onward with euro because dollars were pretty unstable since the current US presidency started...
