The UPS driver showed up at 8:30PM last night with the motherboard. so much for "out for delivery, expected between 12:00PM and 3:00PM" lol. Oh well, they're busy and a question he asked me made it seem like he was a new driver or new to this route, so I definitely wasn't mad at the driver. It just meant that I couldn't actually finish the build last night. Some progress though.
So here's the little chunk in the CPU block:
I drained it, took apart the block, which was easy...then put it back together, which was a little bit more complicated getting the outer O-ring to go back into that shape. Some gentle prodding and wiggling prevailed. I just didn't want to break the thing.
Board in, CPU mounted, RAM in, most connections made:
The plastic film on the motherboard heatsinks is a real pain. They perforated the edges and covered the tops and sides (in between the HS and PCIe slots), which means when you try to peal it off, it tears and leaves all these pieces behind instead of coming off as one chunk. No idea why they did that lol. I have to borrow some fine-point tweezers to get those things out of there.
Some notes so far:
The PSU shroud, while looking great, is just a horrible thing to work around. It makes everything snug and hard to reach. It also was designed in after the case was designed (it comes with Rev 2, but not with this version of the case, they just offered it as an add-on after they designed it) and you cannot easily get to the screws behind the power supply. I did this install with it in place for that reason. I may at a future date just drill a hole in the motherboard tray below the motherboard for screw-driver pass-through so I can get the thing out of there easier. The bottom edge of the motherboard sits below the edge of the PSU shroud (mainly because I had to lower the motherboard tray to make clearance for the radiator fans). Now that It is all connected (which was a pain), I have to see if I can raise the motherboard tray back up because right now I can't get my NVMe adaptor card into the bottom PCIe slot. I had to put it in the second slot, which will limit me to 8X on each slot.
I don't know how to get the pre-attached heat-sink off my M.2 drive to be able to use the motherboard slots. Heat gun? Any tips there would be helpful. If I could install this drive into one of those places, I wouldn't need to worry about the PCI-e slot usage.
I realized that I have no 4-pin molex connectors in the case currently to use for the pump power lol. I need to add that accessory cable, which...getting things connected under this PSU shroud means sticking my fingers into that little opening in the middle there and about a 2" gap along the bottom of the rear panel with the other hand to try and shimmy connections in and out of the supply. Oh what a joy.
I ordered some
45° fitting adaptors for the pump housing. The tubes currently stick out too far to put the glass panel back on and I'd have to kink them to get them to fit right. Putting a water loop just took up all the room this case had lol. I ordered some fan cable extensions while I was at it so that I could have the front fans controlled by temperature instead of just always-on at different speeds-each fan.
I learned that I cannot fit a 3080 hybrid in here now. I thought there'd be room for that radiator on the front, but not so much. I mean...
maybe...I could get angled fittings for the top rad, re-route the tubes, and fit the 240mm rad to the right of my reservoir...maybe...but getting the tubes to reach and look nice would be a chore. I'd likely have to disconnect the reservoir tubes and run a tube from the hybrid rad on each side of the pump housing. That might look rather terrible. Unless I could squeeze those tubes under that hard drive. A little room there and the hybrid tubes are pretty small.
One thing I found concerning: The back of the motherboard has traces around the CPU mounting bracket holes. You have to put a metal nut there to mount the CPU-mount posts. I feel like they needed to leave some more clearance there and it makes me nervous. I may need to find some nylon or fiber washers to put there so I can sleep at night.
OMG...so it has bothered me for years that on the GPU I have, it says "GEFORCE RTX" on it, but there's been this weird "HYBRID" lighting behind that sticker that doesn't line up with the letters for "GEFORCE RTX"...I was like "this is the weirded lighting choice...really don't know why they did that." the "GEFORCE RTX" was a sticker....a STICKER...I did not know that. I removed said sticker and there's a beautiful metal-feature that says EVGA Hybrid. Way better. I can't wait to see what it is actually supposed to look like lit up lol.
Still to do:
-install all the SATA cables (1 SSD on the back of the motherboard tray and two HDDs still in here (one under shroud now).
-Install 4-pin Molex accessory cable from PSU to pump.
-tidy up all the cables, get the far-side panel on.
-drain loop, put 45° fitting adaptors on pump, put EK clear pre-mix fluid in (just running distilled for the moment).
-Oh! Turn the thing on! See what happens lol.
-tweak, tune, test, repeat until satisfied.