Apologies for taking so long to get back to you on this. The objection to EK radiators is probably unreasonable. There's not that much to call between different radiators in terms of performance, but I can't fathom buying new ek ones over second hand thermochill or feser. I can't square saving money on the radiators with full cover nickel blocks and a corsair case either.
Ouch, I clearly need to choose my words more carefully.
As Bubo rightly guessed, my objection to plexi/acrylic is that it is too brittle. It's not thermal fatigue I'm bothered by though, it's the chips missing from the corners of one of my waterblocks and the ek supreme which fractured when I overtightened one of the screws. The warnings about alcohol aren't encouraging either. In contrast acetal isn't as pretty, but is excellent to machine and doesn't fracture unexpectedly. It's a far better material in all respects bar transparency.
Lack of head pressure is indeed the concern with the D5. The cpu block you've chosen is a good one, but it loves pressure. It needs a high flow rate to spray water onto a the copper base of the block, but is rather restrictive so most pumps can't force water through it quickly. The DDC, or multiples of it, is about the best option going. I believe the D5 to be the better pump in nearly all respects (reliability for one), however that it isn't suited to two gpu blocks and an impingement block in series.
I think mine is. That's a full cover and a core-only gpu block, ek supreme, xspc chipset block, two thick 120's, one thin 120 and a thick 240mm radiator. I'm not running them in series for any good reason. Adding a second ddc in series took my load cpu temperature down by ten degrees, though it's possible one of the pumps is defective.
As some slightly more useful advice relative to my first response;
3 litres of fluid XP is very expensive relative to the return on the investment. You're looking at possibly one degree improvement over water. The funds would have been better spent elsewhere. Like on beer.
Undervoltng faster fans would make more sense than buying ones which spin slowly initially, radiators need high pressure fans, and this scales as the square of rpm. On the bright side, they'll make lovely shrouds if you decide to move to 38mm fans.
You can make your life a lot easier by including a fill line and a drain line. A length of tubing attached to one of the spare ports on the ek res, long enough to reach out of the case, with a plug of some sort in the end. You pour water down this pipe to fill the system, avoiding needing to pull the reservoir out of the box or risk testing the dielectric properties of the fluidxp. A drain line generally goes from the lowest point in the loop, via the centre of a T piece, and has a valve on the end. You stick the end of it in a bottle, take the plug out of the fill line, and open the valve. Far, far easier to get the water out this way. If you only go for one of the two, make it the drain line.
Buy a second sli connector and put the cards in parallel. Put both connectors between the cards, and have water going into any remaining port and out of the diagonally opposite one. Slightly better if water goes in the bottom, rises through the cards then out the top to reduce air being trapped. It won't bother your graphics cards at all, but you'll get significantly better flow rates overall which your processor will love.
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