I didn't take pictures throughout the build process, so here it is almost finished with the old Strix B350
Filled and bleeding the air out
Here's a pic in its real and true colors. Somehow, the RGB strips of the case, in their white mode, make every orange element of the build shine an aggressive and more reddish tinge
Here he is in all its glory!
Feuer und Wasser
WARNING: this is not a professional production, I'm just a guy with a passion that likes to mess around with my PCs. So, would this thread reveal itself as a CringeFest, please bear with me, please. Also, comments and advices are super welcome!
That said..
Everything started by the fact that I had a spare 360mm radiator lying around, so I started thinking of a way to use that as well. And then on the Internet I saw the Dark Base Pro 900... it was love at first sight and I knew it had to be mine. Unfortunately I couldn't go with the rev.2 nor with the black/orange version, because it was unavailable by all the shop that could ship it in a reasonable time, so I went with the first black version.
It's a wonderful case, even though I had to get really creative with the placing of my hard drives, as there is nowhere to put them once you remove the cages in order to make room for the pump/res combo... I can't say I reached the prettiest solution but it actually grew on me, so it doesn't bother me at all. Also, the fact that the rev.1 of the case doesn't include a psu shroud hasn't been a problem at all like I first feared, I actually like to see the psu, and the cable sprouting out in front of it give off some kind of an "industrial" vibe, so i decided to let them be.
Furthermore, this build also marked my platform change towards AMD. I came from X99, but after a dead 5820K (plus a 950 Pro that went to hell with it) and a 5960X that I feared to kill (mainly because I got a little paranoiac, as the 5820K died overnight with the pc unplugged from the grid), I switched over to AM4, since I was also very curious to test it.
And then the new parts arrived, so I started everything from scratch. I won't deny it was a pain in the ass to build, I was coming from two open chassis (Lian Li T60 and Raijintek Paean, both custom watercooled) so I wasn't completely sure if I could properly build in such a case at the first shot, but personally I think I did pretty good, look at how pretty he is <3
Soon I will upgrade the front panel with a 4 mm aluminum sheet which I'll modify to improve the poor airflow the stock panel gives
Man, I get a little nostalgic thinking how far I've come with my rig... everything seriously started 4 years ago with a G3258 and a 750 Ti, and look at where i got after all this time...
Fun fact: I went with black and orange for this build too because I already had my black and orange Cablemod kit, and I didn't want to buy another one, otherwise I probably would have gone with red/black or black/gun metal lol
UPDATE (with some decent-ish photos): Aside from the new 2 TB ssd I added, I changed the cooling path of cpu/gpu from parallel to series, as I noticed better thermals this way. Also, as you can see, i used zipties to fix the piping in place onto the fitting, because i changed the tubing with some that has a bigger outer diameter, and so I couldn't screw the locking ring on the fittings' thread. I know, it's far from the best solution, but to be completely honest, I didn't want to change fittings just for this, and I already made sure that they won't leak. Jank af and proud lol!