Well, it has been a long time in the making, and there have certainly been some roadblocks getting to this point. From the global shortage of parts, to my supplier allocating all of my parts to other people in error and having to restart the wait for parts. However, despite all of the problems this build is nearly ready to happen.

Most parts have now arrived, with the exception of some water cooling parts, the motherboard (which still has no ETA unfortunately), memory and GPU. The GPU has been upgraded from a 3080 to a 3090, which turned out to be far easier to get, and a very welcome upgrade to bring the entire system to top of the line parts. The GPU is due to arrive next week, along with the memory and the remaining water cooling parts. We shall just have to keep bugging my retailer to get me the Dark Hero, which unfortunately was the major part to fall victim to being allocated elsewhere by them.

I am hoping next month to finally start this build, and in the mean time I will be starting to manufacture the fan shrouds, which are no longer going to be 3D printed, rather I will be folding these into shape with sheet steel, welding, finishing and having them hydro dipped for paint. The pins and sheathing for my cables is due to arrive next week also, and I will begin manufacturing these as well!

All parts have been ordered, most with an ETA mid to late December, some early Jan. At the back of the queue for 3080 and 5950, unknown ETA

I have designed the shroud and gasket for mounting fans to the 360mm radiators. the shrouds comfortably fit the fans, and allow room within the shroud to run the cables. a hole will be drilled into the side of the shroud as required to run the cabled out of the shroud.

These parts should cost about $250 printed from Shapeways, and they will require some hand finishing prior to painting or dying the NA12

I grabbed a few CAD files of the various parts I am using in this build to test the clearances and fitment of the plumbing with my fan shroud and gaskets installed.

This identified a few clearance issues, which resulted in dropping the height of the gasket to 4mm, and removing the internal clearance on the short edges of the fan shroud. This shouldn't cause any issues with cabling as there is still 5mm clearance internally on the long edges of the fan shroud.

I am contemplating adjusting the top radiator plumbing to be symmetrical with the bottom, however before I can do that, I need to ensure the plumbing will clear the VRM cooling on the motherboard.

I managed to find a model of an intel motherboard that is close enough for the purpose of drafting a plumbing design, however I struggled to find suitable GPU models.

I decided, based on the monoblock I'm installing having a low profile and the top of the motherboard clearing the fan shroud, that I would make the top and bottom radiator plumbing have a similar aesthetic.

Due to the flow direction of my monoblock and the distribution block, I had to get creative with a few bends on the CPU plumbing. Given that most of the bends are 45s, it should be relatively easy to have multiple bends in quick succession without jamming the bending rod inside the tube. I think I came up with an adequately sleek design for this.

I will need to buy a few extra fittings to implement this design, but that's how things tend to go! Now, I just have to wait for parts to start arriving and hopefully receive ETAs on the CPU, GPU, Monoblock and Distroblock. Everything else should be here by the end of the month!

Gotta love 2020 for those fantastic supply and distribution issues.

I was contacted by my supplier today to be informed that the Corsair AX1000 PSU is no longer being produced, so I've had to swap out that for an eVGA SuperNOVA P2 1000W, pretty disappointing to downgrade from an 80Plus Titanium to a Platinum, but that's just how it goes.

Most of my parts have arrived at my supplier, however, I am still awaiting an ETA for the 5950x and RTX 3080. According to my supplier, I am in the middle of the queue for the GPU and right at the back of the queue for the CPU, and I am not to expect an ETA until late January at the earliest.

I have also updated the build to include all the extra fittings I identified will be required when I built the system in CAD, and those have been ordered.

So far, the remaining components with exception of CPU and GPU are due to arrive at my supplier, by the end of January.