A friend had asked me to build an updated gaming PC to replace one that I had built for her in 2016. Her old build consisted of the i5 6400 + GTX 1050Ti in the Thermaltake V1 Snow Edition. She wanted this PC to have a small footprint with the added theme of her favorite game PORTAL. It took almost a year to acquire all the parts. As you can all guess, the GPU took the longest and was the last piece of hardware that was acquired. Note that she did not want me to do any "physical" modding of the Meshlicious case, however paint was acceptable. So I do admit, I may have gone a little crazy re-painting some key hardware .

The cooling strategy for this build was to use the largest rad that could fit. So I used a 280mm x 30mm rad. I had thought about installing another 240 rad on the GPU side, but she wanted full view of her $1000 investment :lol. I had thought about SFF PSU cables, but could not get any with the colour scheme I had planned. I went with traditional PSU cables and with proper planning and sizing, they worked out fine.

I encountered two bottlenecks:

Trying to find the right size pump/res. I initially thought about the Alphacool DC-LT, but didn't think they were robust enough. I tried the EK FLT 80 DDC, but because of the size of the GPU, the unit did not fit how I wanted it to. The solution that worked was using the DDC pump from the FLT 80 and adding a pump top and bottom heat sink.

Trying to find the right sized GPU block for the FTW3 3080 Ultra. The Barrow RTX 3080/3090 was the only block that met the sizing requirement at less than 150mm from the in/out ports to the bottom of the block. Some of my mates indicated that they had experienced leaks with that particular block. I perfrmed leak testing prior to assembly; ensuring cold-plate screws were sufficiently tight.

When it was all said and done, she was ultra stoked to finally get her long-awaited PC and didn't mind the extra paint. Enjoy the build!