Hi there! Finally, after many weeks on and off, this build can live up to its name as my original intention was for this to be a Win/Mac dual boot system. It has been struggling with the Mac part of course and it turns out it had to do with the CPU.



Well ok, maybe partially. I am not by any means a seasoned hackintosher. I have been able to get it to boot on previous builds but the effort it probably would have taken to get it to work was outside of my skill set. While I found one person able to boot on the i9-9820x (my previous processor), they were using Clover with special patching and I am using Opencore. I don't think Opencore is the issue but I saw someone else with the same issue switch to the 9940x and it worked for them....so.....yeah it's booting now.



While we're at it, I upgraded my 3 very old spinning hard drives from previous laptops to 2x 1TB Samsung 860 QVO SSDs.



Stay tuned...

Certainly a lot of learning with this one. As this is my first custom water cooled build, something I said I would never do, my first iteration of it was good but I quickly realized I wanted to change some things.

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Mainly I wanted to straighten the tubing runs without going hard tubing, and clean up the color as the red was nice but it just didn't work. So I went back to what I originally wanted as a theme which is just black and silver with basically no color at all.

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I don't know why but my phone makes the fans look a lot bluer than they are in reality. They are just white in person.

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And that's it for now. It's still not done of course. Still waiting on my desk and cables to come in to finish everything off.

Water-cooling parts used:

CPU Block: EK-Velocity
GPU Blocks: 2x EK-Vector
Rads: 2x EK-CoolStream SE 420
Fittings: EK-Torque 10/13mm
Pump/Res: EK-Quantum Kinetic 300
Tubing: EK-DuraClear Soft tubing 10/13mm
Fans: EK-Vardar EVO 140mm
Controller: EK-Loop Connect

I now know why hard tubing is in. Only a couple weeks after I setup the loop it immediately fogged over the tubes. I thought it was the red coolant so I replaced it and switched to clear but it did the same thing. So I gave in and switched to glass tubes which were, both better and worse to work with.

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Better because I can be more precise with cutting and sanding the ends smooth with glass than PETG. Worse in that they are very strong and brittle as one would expect glass to be. I broke several pieces when cutting them (probably more a noob thing) and while inserting the longest run in the top-back the first time. I fee like this is because the glass tubes are so tight in the fitting's O-rings.

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I followed a few youtubers' advice and cut all of the runs with PETG tubes first so I could get then lengths right, set everything up and ran the loop for a week while waiting for glass cutters, then used the lengths of the PETG tubes to measure the glass tubes.

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Along with the glass tubes, I added an EK Connect Loop so I could control the LEDs in the EK fans. For those that like looking at the business end of builds here's how all of that came together.

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Also I received my custom CableMod cables as well. Yes, there is a mistake in one of the set of bridged PCI cables (one of the center wires is colored black instead of grey). I reached to them and they were very responsive with setting up a replacement. Those should be arriving soon.

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These photos are not doing the lighting justice and I'm no photographer. In person, the lighting is a lot softer, and the color more orange/brown and stronger, oddly.

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Overall I have to say, I really like the look now. I wanted a very clear, crisp, monochromatic look which I think I've achieved here. Would I ever work with glass tubing again?

Ehh......  🤷🏾 I'll get back to you on that one....