Thanks folks! I did think about painting the fans, but as theres already a fair bit of red it kinda blends.
The mesh is extruded steel from B&Q with a spray of matt black
IT LIVES!!
Its up and running as you read this!
Really pleased everythings come together despite some stupidity on my part! There was a fair bit of F-ing and blinding on the setup, due to a strangely wired molex connector powering the Aquaero that somehow didn't cause any damage!
The fill and leak test went well without a drop escaping. Not much trapped air at all and the QDC works great. Filling was simple and the downpipe on the Res worked a treat to feed the pump.
At that point the only things that could go wrong were the expensive ones, so I was growing concerned by the lack of trouble!
After leak testing for about 8 hours I was happy and set about getting the OS up and running.
I hit the first problem with the M.2 SSD...
-Its a M.2 SATA, and the Mobo only supports M.2 PCIe...grrr...so I've had to swap out the M.2 for a Crucial 2.5", not the end of the world.
The next issue was with the Aquaero...
-Once the OS was on and everything plugged in correctly, it wouldn't detect the Aquaero at all. In the end discovered that the molex adapter I was using was wired up in reverse! -the power socket on the Aquaero is tight against the heatsink and limits space so I used a 90' molex. I assumed it must be broken after that, but after fixing the molex it beeped when I powered up and has worked fine since! Phew.
I ended up exchanging the Mayhems pastel white for the UV clear blue and the green colour you can see in the Res is the Aquaero RGB LED showing normal temps which I'm really happy with, and can be tuned to what ever colour I like at my chosen temps.
My Aquasuite setup...its totally stock clocks at the moment. The rises in temp you can see in the data are from a couple short 3DMark tests(Basic, score: 14169 from memory) I did to warm things up. Temperatures across the board seem 'ok' to me. If anyone has any comments or questions about the data I would love to hear as this stuff is new to me. Worst case scenario; if some of the thermal paste has been poorly applied, better I rebuild now than later!
My Idle setup is with low fan RPM to keep the noise down, this settles the Res temp at around 22'C. Increasing the fan speed does quickly lower this. The fan speed is controlled by the Res temperature sensor as I felt this was the most accurate of the bunch.
I'm surprised to see just a 1'C difference between the Radiator IN and OUT Temp sensors, but as the fans are moving slowly, I guess this is the result. Those sensors are the AQ inline sensor; and I'm not overly impressed so far. The build quality is excellent, but the are just a plastic ring, holding an air sensor in contact with a metal fitting. Not sure how accurate that can be.
If anything seems off target, please let me know...
Next, I'll be enjoying my new PC as yesterday a package arrived containing Oculus DK2
As soon as I've dragged myself away from that I'll do some more Benchmark stuff, and once everythings settled, I shall be looking at some overclocking.