First Watercooling Loop!

[Necrodead]

Nice! My first attempt at hard tube ended with some leaks at first. good job!

[shiftymcgoo]

Thanks Necro.

Checked in on her this morning and she was still dry. Most of air is out of the res now and she's running suuuper quiet.

[shiftymcgoo]

Presenting: Shelby, 50 Shades of Blue

I've decided to name her Shelby (due to the blue and white racing stripe paint job) and Shelby's nickname is 50 Shades of Blue, for obvious reasons.

[Necrodead]

Looking great! I'm always a fan of subtle lighting. Maybe you could add an LED or 2 to the cpu block? Thats the only part thats kinda hard to see, and I love the look of those clear EK blocks.

[Chann3l]

That glow is amazing. Excellent job and overall fantastic looking build.

[Father Fuzzy]

very nice shiftymcgoo

thats a badass rig!

[dvnoakes]

1 sweet looking computer! Very nice job!

[Hooded]

Blue lighting looks great in this build

[shiftymcgoo]

Looking great! I'm always a fan of subtle lighting. Maybe you could add an LED or 2 to the cpu block? Thats the only part thats kinda hard to see, and I love the look of those clear EK blocks.

That glow is amazing. Excellent job and overall fantastic looking build.

very nice shiftymcgoo
thats a badass rig!

1 sweet looking computer! Very nice job!

Blue lighting looks great in this build

Thanks guys. I really appreciate the compliments, and I also appreciate the feedback and guidance. I know I can ask some dumb questions sometimes. Just ordered some LEDs for the CPU block. Good call! I was struggling to get that area of the case lit with the two led strips. Can't believe I didn't think of using diodes! Will probably update one more time once those are in.

Some thoughts on the whole build process:

1) The hardest part of the build was the hard tubing. And the hardest part of the hard tubing was measuring properly. I ended up using a few small rulers and some serious mental math to figure out how much tube each bend required. Even then I found I was sawing off 5 or 7mm of tube quite often to help fine tune the fit. The actual bending process of heating and getting good 90 degree bends wasn't too difficult. I definitely got a LOT better by the end. Still a couple that aren't perfect but I'm living with it.

2) Holy crap this build required patience. A lot of patience. I know I'm probably preaching to the choir but this build took me about 4 weeks to complete. Probably somewhere in the area of 30 man hours. Having said that I'm sure I could do it a lot faster if I tried it again now. In any case a standard build is going to seem like child's play now!

3) Lack of attention to detail can kill you. There were a few moments in the build where my confidence fell through the floor because of some minor detail I had either overlooked or failed to understand. Like using EG with PETG or having the correct flow through the CPU block. If it wasn't for this community I think I would have made those mistakes and at the very least had a crappy performing loop OR, more likely, some kind of disaster. Which brings me to my final thought.

4) I can't shake the feeling that I may have done something wrong. Some small detail that won't manifest as a problem for several months. So I'm eternally grateful to this community for helping me and putting up with some of my less intelligent questions. Just be ready. Because I'm probably going to ask some more dumb questions later.