My brother passed away shortly after finishing a 7980XE/X299/RTX 2080 TI build with a custom CPU water loop, which was handed off to me after collecting dust in my parents' basement. It then sat on my coffee table for a few more months, before I finally decided to at least put the GPU to use in my old build - a 3770k build that was finally starting to show its age.

As a birthday present, my wife gave me the thumbs up to put together this new build. In tribute to my brother, I chose to splurge where possible, and decided it absolutely had to be a full custom loop. Part of the driver was thinking I could reuse a waterblock that was among his spare parts, and EK putting their 20xx GPU blocks on clearance as the 40xx series was just being released.

As I planned this to be an "all white" build, my initial desire was to use a NZXT N7 Z790 motherboard, but after months of refreshing the website to continue seeing "coming soon", I finally pulled the trigger on the ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A. At that point, I had already been collecting parts for 5 months, shopping between Black Friday in 2022 and the final wave of parts arriving in March 2023. "All white" eventually gave way to "white, silver/nickel, and clear".

Most of my build time was spent visualizing the layout, making sure that I had a somewhat clean loop. I did not like any of the tube-style pump/reservoir combos out there, and decided the heart of my loop should be a EK FLT240 with a D5 pump. Not wanting to sacrifice airflow and radiator potential, I mounted it vertically to the floor of the Y60 using EK-Loop Angled Brackets, mirroring the angled edge of the case. Amongst my brother's spare parts was an unused pack of ThermalTake V-Tubler PETG that I used for all the bends and runs. As is probably the case with anyone who starts out with a water loop, I overbought on fittings just to have options, and there's still a tweak or two I'd like to make.

The most daunting element of this build was mounting the waterblock for the GPU. Nothing quite prepares you for taking a perfectly fine top-end graphics card, and disassembling it. I had everything else already done and mounted in the case, just waiting on connecting the loop from the reservoir to the GPU inlet and then the GPU outlet to the CPU inlet. I gave myself a few nights without gaming, and took my time through the process, and felt the process ended up being pretty straight forward looking back on it.

Now that it's assembled and dialed in, regular temps are in the mid-30s, and get up to mid-50s during gaming. CPU stress testing got the CPU temp just north of 70. I haven't started playing around with CPU or RAM overclocking just yet. I tried to stick with RGB components on the SignalRGB compatibility list, which I've been using for all-over RGB control. Custom fan curves are controlled via FanControl, primarily driven off coolant temp.