This is my first watercooling loop!

Because my PC is to the left of my desk, I chose an inverted case with a window on the right. Temperature difference compared to upright is a few degrees at most.

The 1080Ti Founders Edition would quickly hit its thermal limit with the stock cooler and start throttling, even at stock clock speeds. The 1700X would also easily reach 80+°C even with a Corsair H80i GT all-in-one cooling loop, so I decided to spring for a cooling looped based on EKWB configurator's recommendation for a silent setup. Delivery took almost three weeks due to parts being out of stock. They were a long three weeks, during which I installed SketchUp and mocked up the entire build, reiterating until I had a sensible number of bends that looked tidy. Once all the parts arrived I discovered that my original plan to have the pump and reservoir unit mounted upright to the front of the case would not work because the graphics card is too long to allow for it. My mockups went out of the window and I had to resort to good old pen, paper and holding the reservoir in various places while trying to decide which looked the best. Unfortunately, I had to settle for blocking the view of the CPU block. Total setup took around seven hours including bending the pipes before leaving the loop to run overnight.

I ordered some white 5V LED strips from eBay and cut them to length for inside the top of the case, the underside of the GPU facing down, and the bottom of the case facing up, then soldered them to a molex connector with thin electrical wire. Combined with the white and grey motherboard, this helps the blue water dye and nickel fittings to stand out nicely.

The RAM is rated for 3200MHz but Ryzen doesn't like its XMP profiles. Following a couple of BIOS updates, I've managed to squeeze out 2993MHz with one of the motherboard's "Try It!" presets which seems to match the RAM's 3200MHz XMP timings but at the lower speed.