Now that I have the case and motherboard, I figured I'd go ahead and start the cable sleeving. Since I don't have all of the other components yet (namely the cooling components), my current plan is to just start with the component side of the cable, and trim/finish the rest of the cable once I have the rest of the components test fit in the case. So far, I've completed most of the 24-pin ATX cable (except for the wires I need to splice into a 2nd wire at the PSU end, which I'm a bit nervous about) and the 2 8-pin EPS cables.

The process of creating the cables definitely has a little bit of a learning curve, but once I figured out how to properly use the crimping tool and got used to using heat shrink to seal the sleeving on the wire, I was soon able to knock out a bunch of cables fairly quickly.

One important thing I learned while researching custom sleeving is that modular PSU cables have different pinouts for different PSU models, and are not universally compatible with each other. Since I couldn't find a pinout diagram online for my PSU (Antec Signature 1000W Platinum), I used a multimeter continuity test to map each terminal from the component side to its corresponding pin(s) on the PSU side. I plan to double check everything against the original cables when I'm done (I would really hate to go through all that effort just to fry one or more of my components!) and I also bought a PSU tester (Thermaltake Dr. Power II) as a final test for the cables before I use them in my system.

Overall, I'm really enjoying the process of making them, and am happy with how they're turning out so far!

I've finished most of the sleeving for the 3 8-pin PCI-E cables (other than the spliced wires, which I'm putting off until I can measure exact lengths), and started testing out the new cable combs I got. The combs are pretty easy to work with (you can snap in the wires into their desired location from both sides of the comb, rather than having to feed them in individually before the connectors are installed). It looks a little off with some of the missing wires, but overall I like how they look and how easy they are to work with.

Other than that, I've got a bit of waiting to do before I can do much more with the build. The distro plate is supposed to be in stock mid-late March, and EK is holding off shipping the rest of my order so they can package it all together.

Once all the fun stuff is delivered, I'll start putting it together and will post updates along the way. I'm taking the week of April 5th off, so I'm hoping I can use that time to finish everything up.

OH I almost forgot! I ordered a RGB GPU backplate from V1 Tech that I think will fit the "Supernova" build theme and make it stand out a little bit. Looking forward to seeing how it looks and whether it meshes well with the sleeved cables and other components. Will post an update when it arrives!

After a while waiting for the distro plate to come back in stock, my order from EK finally arrived yesterday! Somehow I forgot to order the actual GPU block (oops), but I think I have pretty much everything else I need related to water-cooling.

A few other updates:
1. I bought a couple temperature sensor fittings that will measure the temperature of the loop and send that info to the motherboard, both for general monitoring purposes and to help drive the speed of the fans. One of them is a stop fitting and the other is an in-line fitting. I haven't decided whether I'll use one or both yet, but I went ahead and got both so I could try different options.

2. Just picked up 32GB of G.Skill TridentZ RGB RAM. Yay more RGB lol

3. My RGB backplate has also arrived! Really excited to see how it looks all lit up. The blue parts of the backplate matches the blue on my cable sleeving, so I think it will fit in nicely with everything and will help define the "supernova" theme I'm going for.

4. I've also pre-ordered the Core i9-11900k, which should be shipping out on 3/30. While there's some debate about the value of that CPU vs the Core i7, I think the higher binned processor will be more valuable for me as I am planning to overclock at some point. And the built in "Gear 1" support for 3200Mhz memory is pretty nice, and and only available on the Core i9.

So it seems like I may have a slight problem. My GPU block is so wide that I don't think the glass panel will fit if I mount the GPU horizontally as I had originally planned. I haven't installed the block on the GPU yet, but when I rest the block flush against the motherboard, the terminals are touching the glass panel. I suspect once it's installed on the card, it will protrude even further and the glass panel won't fit.

So I may have to mount vertically after all. Which means I won't be able to use my Nova backplate, unfortunately. And I'll need to make sure I find a vertical mount that will accommodate the XE radiator on the bottom.

Time to do some more research and shopping I guess lol. If anyone has any recommendations please let me know!

Since my Core i9-11900k hasn't shipped yet, I'm planning to take a trip to Microcenter today and picking up a Core i7-11700k instead, since they appear to have plenty stock and is admittedly a better value for barely a difference in performance. Plus, more importantly, I am taking this week off from work and would like to get the CPU as soon as possible so I can leave enough time to build and leak test (this is my first custom water-cooling loop).

So, in short - I should be starting my build very soon, and I will post updates along the way!

In the meantime, I went ahead and swapped out the accent ring in the CPU block to match the blue accents throughout the build. Really love how it looks!

Today's been a productive day. Here's what I've done so far:

• Installed M.2 SSDs, CPU, CPU water block, and RAM in the motherboard
  
• Installed motherboard in case
  
• Installed GPU water block and backplate
  
• Installed radiators and fans
  
• Installed PSU
  

A couple of snags I ran into along the way:

• Because of how the GPU I/O shroud attaches to the PCB (screws in from the "top" of the card, unlike the rest of the backplate), the top of the bracket protrudes a bit to give room for the bottom of the screw. The EK block requires me to install the I/O shroud with the screw going the other direction, which causes the backplate to not attach perfectly flush to the card. I'm going to reach out to EK and see if I did something wrong, as it's supposed to be compatible with my card.
  
• With the vertical GPU mount, it's looking like I might have to remove the rear exhaust fan since I have to mount it so high up.
  

Tomorrow I plan to finish mounting the GPU, and then finish up the PSU cable sleeving and testing those cables. Then will come the fun part of building the loop!

I was able to get the GPU installed, and it looks like the GPU block terminals will just barely clear the CPU block. (EDIT: LOL it turns out they actually don't clear the terminals...surprise surprise. Man, this chonky GPU really likes getting in the way of things! But what's a custom water-cooled build without unexpected challenges, am I right?)

Some of the PSU cables were also a bit tricky to fit. The EPS cables barely clear the top fans, and I'm concerned it might get in the way of the tubing. I'm experimenting with a couple different ways to position them to allow for more clearance.

I do like how the 24-pin cable looks next to the triple 8-pin cables going to the GPU. I was worried it would look super messy, but I think it turned out pretty clean all things considering.

So, I changed my mind and decided to start bending and fitting the tubes first, and then come back to the cables after (I figured it would be easier to route the cables around the tubes rather than the other way around).

I started with the bends I thought would be the easiest - the 90 degree bends from the top radiator.

The first bend took a while to get the temperature and angle right (I actually found it easier to eyeball the 90 degree bends rather than use the mandrel), but I eventually got the hang of it and the second tube went much faster and I got the angle right the first time.

The trickiest part (for me, at least) has been cutting the tubes to the right length. Since it's acrylic tubing, I have to cut it with a small hand saw so that it doesn't shatter. I found it quite difficult to make a clean, straight cut with the saw, so I ended up having to do a lot of sanding to straighten it out afterwards. To give more margin for error, I found it best to cut it a bit long with the saw (maybe 1 cm or so) and then gradually sand it down, chamfer the edges, test fit, sand it some more, and so on, until it was the perfect length.

I was very happy with how my first runs turned out. They seem to seat cleanly into the fittings and appear to be parallel to the radiator.

I'm planning to start the bottom radiator tubes next. One of them should be fairly simple, but the other will need to have an offset bend away from the motherboard in order to clear the bracket for the GPU mount.

On a side note, I found some other fitment issues that are going to make the CPU tube runs quite complicated, but I'll cover that in a future update.

Today I was able to finish the bottom radiator and GPU tube runs. Pretty happy with how they turned out.

As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the CPU runs are going to be a bit complicated because the GPU block terminals get in the way of straight runs from the CPU to the distro plate. I'm thinking of doing a small offset bend to clear the terminals, and then mirror the angles of the GPU runs down to the distro plate. That will be a challenging 4 or 5 bends per tube, but I think it will look pretty clean once complete (assuming I don't mess it up lol).

Out of curiosity, I hooked up the EK leak tester to the part of the loop I've finished so far, and seems like something is leaking pretty badly unfortunately. I've ordered some extra stop fittings so I can isolate each part of the loop to try to identify the leak, but I'm hopeful that it's something easy to fix. In the meantime, I'll continue working on the CPU runs and finishing up the PSU cables.

I only had time today to finish one of the complex bends routing to the CPU block, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. It was quite tricky, as it was 5 bends, and a lot of those bends were very close together. After each bend, I often had to put some heat back into the previous bends to keep everything aligned properly; but after a few hours, I was able to get it looking more or less the way I was envisioning it.

The second tube will be a bit easier I think, as I have a template to align it to. I've already got it about 75% done - I just have to finish the last bend and trim the end a bit.

I was able to finish up the CPU loop today. It ended up being a bit trickier than I expected getting the second tube to line up with the first tube, but I think I've got it about as good as I can.

After finishing up the CPU loop, I went on a hunt to find the source of the leaking I saw the other day. After isolating each component, I found that both the top and bottom radiator runs both had at least one leak. One tube was clearly too short, and I suspect another was caused by my temperature sensor fitting not making a good seal with the distro plate. So I'll have to redo at least a couple of those tubes, once my spare tubing arrives in the next couple of days. I'm very grateful that my CPU and GPU loops both seem to be air tight according to the leak tester. It would be a huge pain to have to do those ones over again.

While I wait for my spare tubes to arrive, I'll work on finishing up my PSU cables. For that, I still need to create and sleeve the spliced wires, trim the cables to their appropriate length, attach the PSU side connectors, and test the cables. Looking forward to having those cables finished, as that will be one of the last major milestones before I get to start doing the final assembly and loop filling.

TLDR: My custom sleeved EPS cables are complete and have been tested successfully!

Now for the longer story (because of course there's a longer story lol)...

So it's been a couple months since I've worked on my custom sleeved PSU cables, so I decided to get back into it by starting with the "easiest" task of finishing up the EPS cables (my motherboard uses two of them). All I had to do for those is cut them to length and attach the 8-pin connrectors to the PSU side of the cable. No split wires to deal with for these ones.

Sounds pretty easy, right?

Well, let's just say I was a bit rusty, and made some novice mistakes. On the first cable I actually got all the pins in the right locations and the PSU tester showed that the cable was good! But as I started the second cable I realized I did something really dumb on first cable - I inserted the second row of pins upside down (no wonder I was having so much trouble getting them in the connector...). Even though the cable tested successfully, the pins being upside down meant that they could easily some out of the connector, which would obviously be less than ideal. So I had to take those pins out, and crimp new pins facing the correct direction.

For the second cable I managed to put the pins I the correct orientation, but I put them in the completely wrong locations in the connector. I think when I was ordering the wires, I was looking at the back of the connector instead of the front. Oops. The PSU tester beeped angrily with a red backlight when I attempted to test that cable. So I figured I'd just remove the pins from the connector (I have a handy ATX pin removal tool just for this sort of occasion), reorder them, and put them back in the connector. Simple, right? Well, that didn't go quite according to plan. 3 of the pins were so stuck in the connector that the cables actually came loose from the pins and the pins stubbornly remained inside the connector. For about 30 minutes I tried my hardest to get those pins out. I tried using some tiny tweezers to grip the pin from the back and pull it out, or push it out from the front (while the pin remover tool was inserted), and nothing worked. I ended up giving up and stealing the connector from one of my stock PSU cables. Since some of the wires no longer had pins, and because I had to reorder them to their correct locations, that meant that all the cables were no longer the correct length. So I painfully had to re-trim all the cables and crimp new pins on all of them. Let's just say I've definitely learned my lesson. Next time I will double check the pin order with a multimeter before I crimp pins on them and insert them into the connector. It will save me a lot of time, frustration, and wasted pins.

Eventually I finished and thankfully it passed the PSU tester this time. As brutally honest as that PSU tester is, I was very happy I had it today. Sure I could do a continuity test with a multimeter using the pinout diagrams I wrote, but seeing the PSU tester read the correct voltage coming across that cable just gives you that extra peace of mind.

I'm hopeful that my 24-pin ATX cable and my 3 8-pin PCI-E cables will go a bit more smoothly than these did, despite the added complication of having to splice a second wire into handful of those wires. Should be fun

Over the last few days I was able to finish up the rest of my custom sleeved PSU cables. Thankfully, it all went pretty well, and all the pins were inserted in the correct position and orientation, and all cables passed the PSU tester the first time. Splicing wires wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, and with each one I got better and better at it. I added a few pictures to show my processes, in case anyone is curious.

I also started to bend new tubes for the radiator, this time using the mandrel to get a perfect 90 degree bend (in case imperfect bends were the cause of the leak). Frustratingly, after trimming that tube until it fit perfectly, my leak tester was still showing a leak. After some other tests, I finally figured out what the issue was. It turns out the fittings I'm using don't appear to make a good seal directly against the radiator. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, too. The radiators' G1/4" ports are recessed a bit, and the fittings are wider than that, so the o-rings can't make a good enough seal. If I put back in the extenders that came with the radiator, I don't get any more leaking. I trimmed my original tubes for the top radiator to accommodate the extender, and it didn't leak either! So theoretically, I shouldn't have to re-make all of the other radiator tubes (just the one that needs to be longer after removing the temperature sensor - although now I'm wondering if I can still use that sensor after all).

I ended up ordering 4 more of those extenders because I scratched a couple of them pretty badly when I first got the radiator and didn't know what I was doing. Also, I was already using 2 of them for the GPU loop.

So it looks like I probably won't be completely finished this weekend like I was hoping, but I'm going to try to get as much else done as I can so that once the extenders come in, I can leak test the whole system and start filling the loop!

First, a couple general updates:

• I got in touch with EK regarding the backplate fitment issue with my GPU (MSI 3080 Gaming X Trio), and they have acknowledged the issue, saying there was an incompatibility with a small percentage of the cards they were supposed to be compatible with. They are sending me a new backplate that should fix this issue, but not sure exactly when it will be sent (hopefully soon). I'm considering waiting until I have the new backplate before doing final assembly and filling the loop (it's a pain to install and uninstall the GPU bracket), but I haven't fully decided yet.
  
• The extenders for the radiators should arrive tomorrow, so I theoretically could start final assembly after that, if I don't end up waiting for the new GPU backplate to arrive first.
  

Okay, so what have I been up to the last couple of days?

Well, now that I've independently leak tested each of the tube runs (with extenders as needed), I went ahead and took out all the tubes, GPU and its mounting bracket, and the lower radiator to give me some room to start hooking up all the cables to the motherboard, and work on cable management in the back. I am also taking this time to thoroughly rinse out all the tubes and fittings (and their o-rings), flush the lower radiator again (in case acrylic shavings got into the radiator while I was working on the tubes), and taking an air duster to everything (the case has been sitting open for months and working on the tubes has been fairly messy).

I now have all the cables hooked up except for the lower radiator fans/RGB cables (I just need to hook them up to the splitters I've already installed), the GPU RGB cable (same comment as above), and one of my water temperature sensor cables (more on this later).

As for the cable management, it's taken me a good chunk of two evenings to get where I am now, but I'm fairly happy with how it looks. There are a LOT of cables - probably twice as many cables as any other build I've ever done. Here's a list:

• 10 fan/pump cables (and their splitters)
  
• 13 RGB cables (and their splitters)
  
• 2 EPS power cables
  
• 3 PCI-E power cables
  
• ATX power cable
  
• SATA power cable
  
• Molex power cable
  
• 2 temperature sensor cables
  
• 2 SATA cables
  
• Various front panel connectors (audio, power/reset, USB, etc.)
  

All things considered, Lian Li makes a great case and gives lots of room and plenty of tie-down points to help with cable management. After going through lots of cable straps and more zip ties than I'd care to admit, I've got everything about as clean and compact as I can. All I can say is I really hope everything works the first time and I don't have to undo all this cable management to fix something! But if I do have to take it apart to troubleshoot an issue, I have notes I can refer to about which fan and RGB cables are connected via which splitters to witch motherboard header.

One last thing for this update. Remember earlier I mentioned the temperature sensor that I still need to connect to the motherboard? Well the reason for that is I decided to put a permanent drain port where the temperature sensor fitting previously was (lower part of the distro plate, towards the back of the case). I originally thought it would.ne too cumbersome, but I think it will work well if I use a 90 degree rotary fitting and some extenders to have it feed out the side of the case, through the gap underneath the side fans. I'm still playing around with different ideas for exact configuration, but either way I think it will be much easier to drain the loop rather than having to tip the case in its back to install the drain fitting temporarily. I've attached some pictures of how it looks in its current configuration. I plan to move the temperature sensor fitting to the back of the GPU block (I think the flow will be much higher there anyways).

My replacement GPU backplate has been shipped and is supposed to arrive on Tuesday, but because I didn't want to just stare at my computer all weekend, I decided to reassemble everything anyways and do a final leak test with air. I found some micro fractures in the lower radiator tube with the offset bend, but after bending a new tube (which came out much cleaner than the original), I leak tested again and it was looking good.

Since I had the loop together, I figured I'd go ahead and fill it with distilled water and start doing a water leak test. I figured at least I'd get some practice with filling and draining my loop (I've never done that before), and get an idea for how much coolant I will need to fill my loop. Eyeballing it, it looks around 2/3 gallon, but I will measure more precisely sometime this weekend.

Speaking of coolant, I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I ended up picking up 3L of Liquid.Cool CFX opaque coolant in Pure Blue. I've heard really good things about it, and the color will really be more noticeable and color matched than the translucent blue EK-CryoFuel I had originally planned on using.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I used some new extenders to improve the drain port a bit. I used a single 14mm extender (instead of two 7mm extenders) to offset the drain port from the distro plate, and a 28mm extender to push it further into the back of the case and make it easier to manipulate.

Anyways, that's all for now!

After having water in the loop for about 24 hours, and running the pump for about 10 hours, I'm pleased to report that there was absolutely no leaking!

Once I was done with the leak test, I went ahead and drained the loop to prepare for installing my new backplate this week (and to make sure I didn't get any growth in the loop, since I was running straight distilled water without any biocides). It took me a while to figure out how to tilt the case to get most of the water out (the vertically mounted GPU and the isolated sections of the distro plate made it difficult to get all the water to collect in the main section of the distro plate where the drain port was), but eventually I was able to get enough water out of the loop that I could take the tubes out without making too much of a mess.

When examining the drained water, I noticed several pieces of radiator flux, which was a little unexpected given the amount of time I spent cleaning them out. I also saw a few small chunks in the GPU block, but was able to rinse them out. To help make sure my loop is as clean as possible, I've decided to run the full Mayhems Blitz kit to thoroughly clean everything prior to putting the coolant in. Part 1 of the Blitz kit is an acid that will clean the radiators (theoretically much better than I was doing it before), and part 2 will clean the full loop.

Other than cleaning my system with the Blitz kit, the only other thing I need to do this week is install the new GPU backplate once it arrives.

Hopefully (fingers crossed) by the end of this week my build will be finally complete!

Funny side note - today I realized that I can easily remove the front part of the GPU terminal (it's just a trim piece containing a logo and some LEDs). If I removed it, if would shave at least a few millimeters off the hight of the card, which would allow me to mount it horizontally. At this point, I'm somewhat committed to the vertical mount, with my custom cables being trimmed to a specific length and water cooling tubes bent for the vertical mount, but it's nice to have that option available if I ever want to switch. While the vertical mount looks nice, it is quite cumbersome to install (and uninstall) and it kind of gets in the way of everything while installed (partially blocks CPU block tube runs, one of the lower radiator tube runs, and all the bottom half of the motherboard connections), but I'll stick with it for now unless it becomes a problem.