Hey guys,
 
It's my first time documenting a build and I figured I could get some feedback (of any sort!) by posting here on the forums. I have a few pictures and comments compiled  from my build thus far. Hopefully you all enjoy.
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Towards the end of last month I decided to bite the bullet and order my components that I've been researching for the past few months. I’m currently running a Zalman all-in-one H2O setup and I wanted to take the plunge into a fully custom H2O setup. I have an X58 build and I’m probably going to wait until the GK110’s and the enthusiast Ivy Bridge models come out to do any upgrading of the PC hardware. So the purpose of this build is a custom water-cooling setup to use instead of my Zalman case (which has inadequate cooling ). I decided to go with the LD PC-V8 because it was love at first sight.  hah.
 
I’ve been working on the build for a few weeks now and I’ve received most of my parts. I’m waiting for my Aquacomputer Aquaero 5 XT, flow meter, and MDPC sleeving to arrive so I can finalize all the cable lengths inside the case and start transferring components. Since I have a bit of free time while waiting for parts so I decided to post some of my pictures thus far to give you guys a glimpse of what I’ve come up with and get some thoughts on what you think.
 
The components I plan to include with this build are as follows:
 
LD PC-V8 Case
8 – 120mm Gentle Typhoon Fan - 1850rpm
2 – 140mm AeroCool Shark Red LED Fan
1 – 120mm AeroCool Shark Red LED Fan
2 – 480mm Black Ice SR1 Radiators
1 – Aquaero 5 XT Fan Controller (don’t have yet)
1 – Aquacomputer Flow Meter
4 – Aquacomputer Inline Temp sensors
4 – Air temperature sensors
2 – Swiftech 655 D5 Pump
2 – Bitspower 655 Conversion Kit (matte black)
1 – Bitspower Dual D5 Mod Top (POM)
1 – EK 250 Advanced Reservoir
1 – SeasSonic X-1250W Fully Modular PSU
Fittings – Bitspower Shining Silver 3/8" x 5/8" compression     
Tubing - red Primochill 3/8" x 5/8"
Coolant - Distilled Water w/ kill coil
 
I’m going with Bitspower Shining Silver 3/8” x 5/8” compression fittings, I’ve only purchased one straight, one 45, one 90, and one 5 way rotary snake with m-m adapters. I’ve done this is so I can estimate which fittings will be optimal in each position.
 
I also purchased lots of electrical wire and sleeving to redo my PSU cables. 
 
Most of this work is done at night in poor lighting conditions so please excuse the quality of some of the pictures. Some of the following pictures were taken with my phones camera before I obtained a decent digital camera.
 

 
This was the unboxing of the first shipment I received. I’ve since replaced the EK 150 and gone with a slightly larger EK 250 res.
 

 
The conversion kits and mod top are too sexy and these beasts are much bigger than I anticipated. With the 480 rad taking up most of the room on the bottom of the case (as seen below), I need to get creative with the placement of these monstrosities.
 

 
After receiving my black sleeving kit from MDPC I decided to get down to soldering extensions to the fans to make their cables the same length. This was my first time soldering and I had no idea what I was doing. After struggling with it a bit, I realized the solder I was using had too large of a diameter for use with 26 gauge fan wire… Doh.  After purchasing the right solder, everything worked great! I don’t have any pictures from the creation of the fan extensions, just some after I insulated the exposed connections with liquid tape and added some MDPC sleeving.
 
The screws that come with the Black Ice SR1 rads are around 27mm in length so they work great with just 25mm fans attached, but after adding the bracket for mounting in the lower portion of the case and some MDPC cable management clips, they’re way to short. This is the reason some of the screws are different finishes... I hadn’t quite finished painting them all. Anyhow, one down, one to go! I think it turned out quite well. 
 

 
First off, the fans are mounted to pull on both rad configurations.
 
For testing purposes, I combined the 4 fans into a single 3 pin fan connector and powered them on to make sure all the connections were good and everything worked! Now I just need to wait for my Aquaero 5… I ordered it on Mar 22, but have yet to receive it.
 
The current outlook is that each rad will have its own fan channel, but I haven’t decided whether I want to make the sets of 4 fans run directly to the AQ5, or if I want to terminate it right after all 4 fans meet with a fan connector. Then I’ll make an extension to bridge the two together. I think the latter option will give me some additional flexibility and make it much easier to do maintenance in the case.
 
Now on to pump placement . At the moment, I’m not sure how many video cards I plan to get when I eventually decide to upgrade. Most likely I will do a 2-way SLI setup, but I want to have the option for 3-way SLI just in-case. With this said, I need to have room for an additional 480 rad in the bottom of the case. This makes the placement of the pumps a bit more difficult. After careful deliberation, I decided to mount the pumps upside down below the HDD cage where the inlet will be directly connected to the res with a 5-way rotary fitting. The pumps are magnetically driven so hopefully everything works upside down. :O
 
Here’s an additional picture of the pumps with a few compression fittings attached. This was right before I mounted them in the case. My cat decided to inspect my progress and attempted to chew on the wires. 
 

 
After a bit of measuring for placement of the res and pumps, I needed to drill the holes to make everything work. I attached the pump and the 5-way rotary so that I could determine the positioning of the res. After getting everything attached, I realized it was extremely difficult to tighten the 5-way rotary fitting with the res already mounted. I had to remove the bottom of the res and screw it onto the fitting, and then screw the res cylinder to the already attached bottom section. This seemed to do the trick, but out of curiosity, is there an easier way to tighten the Bitspower 5-way rotary fittings?
 

 

 

 

 
My PSU is in! I’ve installed it in the case and whew, it barely fit! :O
 

 

 
One thing I don’t like about the SeaSonic PSU is that they have an 18-pin and 10-pin connector from the PSU to the 24-pin motherboard connector, which makes sleeving it a bit harder. I wonder why they did it this way. 
 
Anyway, I decided to go through the painful process of removing the sleeving off of the stock cables so that I could create a wiring diagram for correctly reproducing sleeved cables. The stock sleeving was attached with glue, zip ties, and heat shrink. Trying to preserve the cables was a difficult process with an xacto knife . Plus, I couldn’t find 18 or 10 pin connectors for purchase so I will have to use the connectors that came with the power supply to make my finalized cables.
 
The results:
 

 
After removing the sleeving from the cables, I created this diagram for the pin outs. I need to double check my work, because it was quite late when I created it. It shows the corresponding wire placements from one end to the other. The left-most column excluding the 24-pin mobo connector is the side which connects to the PSU. The numbers of the socket placements is off as well; when I created this I didn’t realize the connectors actually had numbers on them. In this diagram, when looking at the back of the connector I labeled the top-left socket as pin 1 (this is shown in the following picture). Additionally, on the 24-pin connector there are 5 pins that are duplicated on the 18 and 10 pin connectors, which are highlighted in a different color.
 

 

 
Now, I wait for my sleeving from MDPC. I stitched together a screenshot from MDPC of the colors I chose: black, titanium grey, and color-x. Hopefully it turns out to my liking.
 

 
More pictures to come as I continue with the build. I think I might pull down my rads tonight and attach a 3-pin connector to the end so all I will need to do when my AQ5 comes in is to create the extension cable. Hope you all enjoyed and stick around for more to come.
 
If you have any ideas or questions please let me know!
 

Can't wait to see the final project done. Looks to be a really good setup.

This is going to be AWESOME I think! Keep up the good work :D

looking forward to seeing the final project... i'm thinking before i start painting cases and getting cables sleeved i may need to do a lot of prep...

LDcooling
Nicee :) Can't wait to see more ;)

The man himself! 
 
BTW, you did astounding job with the layout and production of this case, it's worth every penny. I have absolutely no faults with it as of yet. 
 
I would love to get the XL window for it, but I'm a bit over budget so it will have to wait. 

Nice! Love these monster builds.

 
 Very nice!      

I haven't quite used this one yet, but I've had a few lower wattage ones in the past and they were great. The only thing I really don't like is the modular motherboard cable but there's nothing I can do now. 

Small update:
 
I've started making some sleeving and it's been a slow process of trial and error . I must say, it's certainly more difficult than it looks, however, once I got the technique down it started looking better and I began moving at a faster pace. I made the mistake of learning with my CPU cable which was my longest set of cables. I think starting with something shorter first would have made things much easier. One good thing though, if I decide to not redo the cable it does stay hidden due to the nature of it's location on the board. I need to figure out how much materials I'll have left before I decide anything. In the following pictures I just transferred my motherboard from one case to another so the barbs on the waterblocks will change once I spec out what I need. Now onto the pics! 
 



 
I also worked on the 8 and 6 pin connectors for my video card. This one shouldn't have given me problems but of course it did...  I had sleeved the the entire 8-pin connector and wanted to see how it looked... only to realize that the molex clip mounted on the bottom which reversed my sleeving colors. This also revealed the lettering printed on the SeaSonic connectors. Argh. After this small injunction, progress was smooth. Here are a few pics of the completed PCI-e connectors.




 
Also good news about my Aquacomputer parts! I spoke with FrozenCPU today and they've shipped my flow meter and they said the Aquaero 5 XT will soon be on its way as well. After I get these parts in, I need to spec out all the compression fittings and purchase tubing. Hopefully, I will get much more progress in before next week which I'll be going out of town for a few days... This will slow my updates down a bit.
 
Tomorrow I think I'll start on the 24-pin motherboard connector, after that I need to shorten and sleeve the pump wiring, measure and sleeve the custom SATA cable, and terminate the remaining connections to the Aquaero 5. Then I should be done with the sleeving aspects.
 
I'm shooting for a completion date of May 13th, but as long as my system is put together by May 15th when Diablo III comes out, I'll be happy.  But I have lots more work to go. 
 

If anyone is interested, I was able to find the molex connectors SeaSonic uses for their PSU by scrounging through the Mouser catalog, however, I couldn't find black so white will have to do . This shouldn't matter too much because it will all be hidden in the bottom compartment. They can be found in the Interconnects -> Rectangular Connectors -> Molex section and the part numbers are:
 
3901-01-2100 - Headers & Wire Housings 10 CKT RCPT HOUSING (Motherboard connector)
3901-01-2120 - Headers & Wire Housings 12 CKT RCPT HOUSING (PCI-E connector)
3901-01-2240 - Headers & Wire Housings 18 CKT RCPT HOUSING (Motherboard connector)
 
Since I haven't been able to work on cabling/sleeving, I decided to get the rest of my rig squared away because I still needed to order my fittings and tubing. I drew a quick mock up (not to scale!) and routed things in a way that should hopefully be clean and effective .
 
I figured a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is my terrible drawing... 
 

 
I used the straight, 45, and 90 degree fittings I purchased originally to get the best fit for each of the 21 compression fittings and placed an order for both the fittings and some 3/8" x 5/8" Primochill Red UV tubing. Hopefully I will have everything I need to finalize all my connections.
 
Let me know if you guys notice anything out of the ordinary with the above drawing or have any questions!
 
Thanks

esCob4r
Coming out nicely! Can't wait to see this bad boy finished! 

 
Glad you like it, it's been a trip for me as well.

Delirious
I will be watching this one closely as I am looking at that case.  Where did you buy from and how much?

I bought the last non-reverse HPTX in stock from FrozenCPU.com and I from what I recall it was $599 before a 10% off coupon.
 
When I received the case I realized it did not come with PCI slot covers or the HPTX cover, which I had to purchase separately from ldcooling.com
 
Edit: I pulled up my invoice from FrozenCPU in an attempt to get you a direct link since it doesn't show up when searching there site... Only to find this message :
 

 

Your rig is coming along nicely!
 
You mentioned awhile back that the 27mm screws for the radiator/fans were too short to reach through everything. What size did you have to use in order to get everything to fit, 35mm?
 

I'm pretty much finished with the build for the parts I've received, the only thing left is the custom SATA power cable for the HDDs. Other than that I have nothing to do until receive the Aquaero 5. Once I get this I'll sleeve the 8 temperature probes, chassis fans, rad fans, flow meter, and start placing the tubing in the loop for testing.
 
Yesterday and today have been pretty busy. I completely stripped down the rig and cleaned all the old and new components with hot distilled water to remove any traces of the blue dye I used in my previous build and any manufacturing residue left from the production of the radiators. I wired and sleeved the vandal switches for my power and reset buttons on the front of the case. I reduced the lengthy cables from the two pumps and terminated them both into a single molex connector which runs directly to the PSU. I mounted the flow meter on the HDD cover plate, and I've attached all the compression fittings and in-line temperature probes.
 
I think I'm going to wait till the very end before properly routing and tying up all the cables because chances are I will have to tear it all down before finalizing everything.
 
Here are the pics so far:
 

deffinately looks sweet.