Ive been building high end Gaming and Workstation PC's for over 20 years and up to this point have done mostly air cooled rigs, a few AIO's and mild modding to hide cables and such just so they are visually appealing for both for my personal workstations and my clients. By day I am a 3D technical animator and VFX artist and in my 'off time' for lack of better words I am also a professional photographer, but have been building and modding for the longest of any of my passions. So with my jobs I generally need a ton of power especially when rendering animations and in the past my workstations have generally looked good enough to be on the desktop as unfortunately as I'm usually in a big hurry to get the machines built so I can work. Now that I am at a point that I can work on one machine and build or rebuild another, I want to push my creative limits venturing in to the apparently very addictive world of water cooling so here we go.

I have named this rig ' DeepBlue ' after one of the largest Great White Sharks to be seen at Guadeloupe Island off the west coast of Mexico, as I also love diving and photographing those amazing creatures.

When I built this one I wanted lots of cooling as the computer will be running 24/7 and a lot of that time it would have the CPU pinned at 100% when rendering. I had ordered a 420mm radiator to go with my current 280mm and when it arrived, the box looked huge and I was a bit worried about getting it in to the 500P case but with a little time and planning modifications ahead, to the case frame and the front bezel, it fit quite nicely. The hardest part was getting the reservoir to fit and still look ok, as it was too wide to fit between the fans on the backside of the radiator and the video card. So I cut down and modified a bracket out of a piece of aluminum angle bar, painted and then mounted to the case and the reservoir to the bracket. This was my first attempt at bending tubing, let alone acrylic and I think it went pretty smoothly. I tried to take my time to get the bends as nice as I could and all were done by eye for the most part. There were a couple spots in the tubing that warped a little bit, but in the end I was happy with the result. Anyway on to the build photos