Side 2, as mentioned previously, is for the girlfriend. Now she does a lot of brain research and takes it pretty seriously (stuff that goes way above my head). So I wanted to make this come off somewhat "brainy". It wasn't exactly like what I had in mind but with just some cans of spray paint, hex mesh rolls and a small 3D printed brain, there's only so much you can do with time, effort and some creativity. Incidentally, I know how to pull off a killer camo effect now as well!
 
Remember the stock motherboard with the EK FC blocks on it from before:
 

I took off the backplate, armor, and both blocks. Beginning with a naked Asus M6F (but with the Koolance 380i on it, which incidentally you should all ignore is even present here):

Not a bad looker if I do say so myself. Then I went to work on the EK blocks:


Ok then, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if you thought this was a horror theme going on. Carrying on, I worked on the armor in the same way:

Does that help? No? What about this:



Ok I know it is a stretch, but I was going for a brain matter color. I used the 3D printed brain to "etch" in the patterns and texture in the two colors. The EK MOSFET block has spray in the middle because it is covered by lines the armor and so that way both colors come off through it. The GF thought it was sweet and not creepy, so it worked out :D
 
Her advisor is gifting her a 3D print of her actual right hemisphere (not the full brain for whatever reason) so I will try to work it into the build somehow if possible. As far as the color scheme goes- if I go with the RVE monoblock for Side 1, that frees up the Supremacy Evo. So I will try to get a red plexi top for it and run a white pastel throughout. The GPU block is a Swiftech R9 LE which has a red insert also, and the reservoir will likely be the FrozenQ LF 400mL cylinder version with fluorescent red helices. While it won't be very transparent with pastel in the reservoir, the UV effect should give a nice spiral glow.

Double post.

 
Back from the dead (well nearly so). I had some nasty medical issues to take care of and now currently recovering from a surgery. This combined with the custom parts from Caselabs and the whole review website taking off pretty well resulted in this massive delay.
 
But here we are. Caselabs worked on this for a while, and I finally have a TX10 HPTX to XL-ATX conversion kit (which incidentally is now available for retail purchase also!):
 

 

 

 
Each kit comes with an XL-ATX motherboard tray, a backplate for the motherboard tray and the new divider section for the case itself. The reason I went for this is because the TX10 comes standard (well used to till now anyway) with HPTX which is more or less dead in the enthusiast segment now:
 

 
Having even an E-ATX board such as the RVE on it looked out of place:
 

 
Now with this on, and re-using the back section:
 

 

 
Ah much better. A few hours on the case and everything was in:
 

 
Of course it had to be done for both sides:
 

 
There were a few hiccups such as the ATX motherboard mounting holes being slightly offset for some reason but we worked through it, and Caselabs was amazing as always. New trays came in which were perfect.
 
Now with that taken care of, I had a few items come along which weren't for review:
 

 

 
This is a red plexi top for the EK Supremacy Evo, and they were good enough to send the badge separately. My original plan was to go replace the top on the standard plexi top version:
 

 

 
to the red plexi top:
 

 

 

 
I will have to see how this looks with something like a white pastel coolant through it, but as is it clashes a bit with the lighter colors on the motherboard. To further complicate things, I got this:
 

 

 
That nickel finish isn't exactly like how it is on the Corsair Dom Plats, but it gets close as you can see here:
 

 
Along with the red plexi top was this:
 

 
A strange no-name box? What could be inside?
 

 

 

 

 
Ah so it is a D5 pump top in their CSQ style. Or is it?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Now we are talking! I also got this:
 

 
But let's save that for the next update. Don't want to get ahead of myself again :D

Scarlet-Tech
Very nice. I got 4 of those beautiful xtop pump tops, and love them!

Just forgot to get two more reservoirs, so now the waiting game begins for that, lol.

Were you able to buy them separately? This was a special request. I have been trying to get EK to sell these and the acetal version separately, and not just as combinations with the pumps included for a while now.

Scarlet-Tech
I had to specifically request them separate, because I already had all 4 pumps. They didn't even hesitate, lol. I don't like that it is only a pump combo either. I wish they would sell them individually.

I do have two d5 pwms that I haven't used because one didn't start up when I turned on the PSU... That worried me when I was testing it, so I went straight to the Varios pumps. I like those much more and won't buy pm pumps again.

I wish you would give PWM pumps another go, especially if you end up going DDC PWM. The D5 PWM has a wonky PWM implementation that differs from the Intel specs so it's not a good baseline to be honest.

Looking forward to more pics.