As promised, been very all over the place the past weeks moving but managed to pretty much strip down the old build and made good progress with this one until the case turned out to be utterly unusable due to the motherboard tray sitting too low and not aligning as it should... Still going back and forth on it and to be honest its dragging on longer than it should for a £300 case.
See here my key problem, sits too low and this is as far as you can actually sit the PCI cards:
Basically its useless, can't use the case so now completely stripped it down again and removed all fans/rads (not happy). The board does not align to the case well on top of the height issue:
And on another note the mounts once I really looked at them are so restrictive in terms of the radiator and basically will not leave room for push pull, i've suggested them move the fan mounts back 1-1.5cm as its easily possible and stops them sitting so far forward where you need to connect the front panel etc.
Anyway... While this has all been going on i've been learning to braid and tidy up the cables, i've ordered a load of connectors so planning to make some custom cables direct to the PSU to have a nice tidy build instead of the madness that often ends up behind the good stuff. the GPU combs look pretty nice when in in my opinion but each to their own:
Braided the Aquaero connectors, hated the massive cheap black braid it came with...
And finally I managed to get hold of this rare creature from Holland, complete with some mod kits and another EK D5 pump to complete my flow powered dream... It wasn't cheap but pretty much I just wanted a dual top and this is the only one I've seen that actually looks nice. The base plexi comes off and is not required so my plan is to drill out two holes in the mounting plate in the case and mount horizontally up the the notched grip on the mod kits. Secure then in place probably with some hot glue which will also absorb the virations...
The top, I replaced the black O rings with UV Blue - the front will also be replaced when I get round to ordering one:
Braided the pump cables ready to rock, connectors are still off as i'll probably trim them as I don't think they'll need to be so long.
And thats about it for now, the saga of the case continues - if its not resolved soon I give up and i'm ordering a Parvum L1.0.