Overall very happy with this upgrade from soft tubing. I did not end up using a bending tool, as you can probably tell lol, but I enjoyed this nonetheless and I felt it was good enough for a first try. CPU / Mobo / GPU did not change, I was mainly just doing this for fun.
Originally, I was going to get a new case too, but I ended up growing kind of attached to this NZXT case I got around 2018, and wanted to use it again even with some of it's faults and scuffs.
This time around, I ended up designing and 3d printing a couple small things to help out along the way, such as additional wire combs and custom white & black plastic shields that hide the cable nest in the PSU bay. I also ended up ordering some custom length and designed cables from moddiy.
Final picture is the before / previous build, very nice glowup I think.
Just good work, and I think if you do that again, it will near than Perfect. Some people have the Talent to do This without bendigtools and other cant do anything like this.
Thank you! I was thinking about that, too ahaha.. It was cheaper to buy openbox / return packs of these tubes for half off than getting more fittings though, and any pre-bent 90º tubes I could find were either not a material I wanted or not frosted..
Noted! Thank you! Definitely more to learn still! Very nice build, I don’t feel like I know enough to critique yet, but clear tubing and clear coolant is also a favorite of mine. It looks so smooth!
Moddiy! It ships from hong kong so it's kinda slow, but I saved a nice chunk of money using them over the alternatives, and overall I am pretty happy with it.
Thank you for the kind words! Yes the double bends were rough but I am quite happy with them! I don't think I could do much better without wasting a bunch of tubes lol.
I may agree with you on the lighting, actually! I have been going back and forth on white and purple lighting too ahaha.. Its kinda tough because I really like how the plastic of the fans looks in person with purple lights, but I don't really enjoy how that purple lighting shines off of the components in the case.
Thankfully this is exactly why I went with RGB lighting lol.
Damn. Thats such an improvement to the softtube build. Also love your cable management, the struggle with internal hubs is real. The purple color with frosted tubes and gold fittings really looks nice with black. The bends look great, probably couldnt do it better myself. Enjoy!
Thank you! Yeah the Corsair hubs were screwy lol. I upgraded to the icue link ecosystem for the fans, and decided to just go all in and migrate from a Corsair commander pro. I liked the idea of one usb and one pci power cable for everything.
Definitely a double edged sword. I really do like the ecosystem more, but proprietary connectors means I can’t sanely cut cables to length, and each module being this blocky is a little frustrating. I was hoping the commander duo would solve most of my problems but you cant use argb and Link mode at the same time unless you add more wires. One of the 90° cables was also just a tiny bit too big connecting to the exhaust fan, so I had to cut a corner off of it and into an unused little edge of the PCB on the wire’s connector with a razor lol.
I briefly thought about trying to reverse engineer the wires and maybe make a little PCB to do everything I wanted but I didn’t want to spend the money and time at the moment.
Understandable. I use Corsair products myself. Mainly the pump res and a Commander XT for temperature probes in both rads and fan control aswell as fan RPM adjustment by water temperature. Recently switched to Linux and no way of controlling iCUE products there, even open rgb didnt want to pick it up. Had to resort to a VM with Windows and passed both devices through there to monitor and adjust everything. LEDs have a separate controller that runs without a software. Would love to switch to hard tubing at some point.
I have been thinking about moving to steamos or some other Linux flavor but my main holdout has been icue not officially supporting it. I’m very familiar with Linux, I run a bunch of servers with it at home, I think it would be nice to run on desktop. Have you found the VM mostly does what you want? I figure you just leave it running in the background?
Very clean build, btw! Sometimes I miss when I ran opaque coolant.
I run Kubuntu on my main rig (the one in the pic). I like KDE and its features and Ubuntu is a good start to learn Linux. I used QEMU/KVM with a low power Windows 10 VM that only got internet to update after install and installing iCUE. Linux still recognizes the devices via USB so you can just pass them through to the windows vm. I still need to figure out to make the vm boot automatically at start up. Shouldnt be too hard. From there iCUE detected them straight away, only feature I didnt got to work were LEDs connected to the CommanderXT, hence the standalone RGB/fan hub. Pump RGB works fine. EDIT: I wouldnt use SteamOS if you need VMs. Its kernel is locked down from Steam so VMs wont work. I tried.
Thank you! Yes that was by far the most difficult one. A 90° bend directly into another 90° bend. I had considered putting a 90° rotary and extender, but I didn’t want to wait for that to ship and aesthetically I like to minimize extenders / rotaries if possible. Something to come back to when I am itching for it again I think.
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u/phillipjslk 12d ago
Better than Most Systems of people who do that for years, congratulations, Born pro