This is the end of about 3 months of on and off work and waiting for parts and being lazy
I've been lurking on these forums for quite some time now. (this has also been posted on overclock.net forums)
I'd like to thank Wanou for his inspiration with project milk (I would not have had the courage to cut my power supply cables had it not been for your guide!). I'd also like to thank teflontanten's project black and red which was a good starting point for what I wanted the end result to look like.
Let Me Start off By saying that this was my first attempt at any custom water cooling whatsoever and also the first time I've ever built a mini ITX system. This was also the first time I've ever attempted any sort of power supply mod.
A few things I learned:
-Watercooling fittings can get F@*KING Expensive!!!
-It's good to take breaks and step away from the project for a while to come back with a fresh mind.
-The Hadron Hydro is an extremely hard case to work with, BUT if you throw enough time (and money lol) into it, it will turn out amazing
When I began this project I first thought I'd buy the Hadron Hydro and the cooling kit and make a few mods here and there. I quickly realized that this case is (no offense to anyone) pretty ugly if not heavily modified. This is when I started burning a hole in my wallet! The only thing I kept from the Hydro cooling kit was the radiator!
I started with removing the HDD bay and also making sure not to completely cut out the optical drive tray as I wanted room for a blu ray drive. Then came the task of shortening all the power supply cables and attaching pre sleeved extension cables, which is a must with this case if you want it to look good on the inside!. Then came the task of attaching the reservoir/pump to the case with 1 inch long nylon spacers so I could route the ATX power wire behind it and to the motherboard. Then I drilled holes for the wifi antennae. The last thing I did was mount the SSD and HDD onto a bracket that holds 2X 2.5inch drives and then attached it to the power supply, putting it directly under the GPU. The GPU is actually hiding most of the wiring for me, so thank you GPU!
This is still not finished as I have not done any lighting which is going to be another pain. I'll update with pics once I accomplish this. Also I'm working on changing the reservoir top to a multi port top so that I can fill this thing more easily. The clearance between the fan and reservoir makes it impossible to fill via the port on top, so I implemented and extra port on one of the outer tubes that connects from radiator to the "IN" port of the pump, although this does not work well at all and I need to tilt and move the entire PC around in order to fill it, so at the moment the reservoir is not filled to an optimal level.
[PARTS]
-EVGA Z170 Stinger Motherboard
-Intel I6700k Processor
-Nvidia GTX 970 Stock (place holder for pascal titan
)
-32gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4 Memory
-512GB Crucial SSD (forgot which one)
-1TB 2.5inch Seagate SSHD
-Lite-On DC-6E2SH Blu-Ray reader/ DVD writer (No Blu-ray writer has the proper eject button placement. Even on this the drive the button is about an inch higher than where the case button is supposed to hit. Some double sided adhesive was used and it's not a perfect solution, but the eject button works if you press really hard
)
-All matte black Bitspower fittings
-Bitspower PETG tubing
-EK-XRES 100 D5 Pump
-XSPC EC6 UV Green Coolant
-EVGA supplied Radiator
-2X Corsair quiet edition sp120
Project Venom:
