Last night (technically, the early hours of this morning) I gave in to the temptation of busting out the Phantek's blocks to confirm that they fit on the cards. But before doing that I thought I ought to check that the cards were working stock...
Which thankfully they were. I think in various reviews these bad boys have been described as 2.5 slot cards and that is a very fair description - the two cards with their stock coolers were practically touching each other, and with the Mobo mouting plate in the lowest of its three settings (which I was trying to see if the extra headroom would allow both rads to have their ports at the top) the bottom card was just effectively resting on the PSU!
With the water blocks fitted the cards are way thinner but I decided to raise the Mobo plate to its middle setting which I think gives the layout a more balanced feel to it and I'd anyway concluded that it wasn't going to be practical to have both rads with their ports at the top so the extra sliver of space wasn't really buying me anything. And then, this afternoon the EK Res and twin-pumps turned up which means that I've now pretty much locked down on the placement for all the key pieces of the jigsaw...
I've not yet fully decided on how to route the tubes just yet, I think that there's a natural flow to it (no pun intended) but the exact routing is, I think going to develop organically once I get the heat gun fired up. That said one idea that I've been thinking about is to use t-junctions to feed-in/out of the cards and then route the pipe up through the "slot" between the ports and the SLI bridge to the VRM block...
But as the gap is only 39mm in the gap between the two blocks it's looking like it might be too tight. As I don't yet have all the fittings that I've ordered (including some T's) I won't know for sure for a wee while yet.
The other thing to share is that I've decided that I'm going to try and get the cabling to a level where I won't need a shroud. Having never done any custom cable before that might be a decision that I may need to revisit, but on the other hand if I'm going to invest the time into custom cabling I think it would be good to show case it more fully.