Water Cooled Define R5

brycef9mm · October 4, 2015

I am a long time fan of Fractal Design. I have had my personal rig in a Define series case for the past 4 years. Starting with the R3 (put my own window in it), I had several R4s, and now my personal favorite, the R5. I have to say, Fractal Design did a great job with this case. They took the R4, which was already great, and somehow improved on almost everything. That's my take on the case. When starting this build, I wanted to make something really clean yet be able to hold all the hardware I wanted. One thing that I have always liked from some of the NZXT cases is the PSU shroud. It makes the whole thing look that much cleaner. I decided to put my own version of that in my R5. I got a piece of 3mm alloy and put it in a break to get the bend I wanted. Then I hit it with a few coats of paint. It cleans the whole build up. I also did my first cable sleeving job. I had always been afraid to do it, but I decided to give it a shot this time. It came out pretty great I think. Since I had the PSU cover now, I decided to go ahead and hide the hard drives under it also. The bottom one is mounted with 4 anti-vibration screws that are screwed in from the bottom fan vent. Then I just used some velcro and a hard drive sled to mount the other one on top of it. Yes... I know, not the best solution in the world, but hey, it works! And for anyone wondering, the hard drive and power supply temps are totally fine. Since I had the hard drives under the power supply cover, and my SSD on the mounts in the back (thumbs up Fractal Design, the SSD mounts are 100X better now) I had no reason to keep the stock hard drive cages. I also don't use a optical drive and since it isn't riveted in anymore, I took that cage out also. This left me with a ton of room in the front. I decided that it was time to upgrade from my 2 year old H80i to something bigger and nicer. I stumbled upon the Raijintek Triton and fell in love with the way it looked. I got it. No mine hasn't leaked. This 240mm radiator fit perfectly into the filtered front intake on the case. Raijintek's stock fans were way to loud so I replaced them with a pair of Corsair's SP 120mm Quiet Edition. I also kept the stock Fractal Design 140mm fan in the back as an exhaust. And that basically about it. Last new thing I did was add some LEDs. In my previous rig, I had a RGB setup, which was nice and all, but the "white color" looked terrible (it was just the red, blue, and green lights on at the same time). So this time around I went with a 12V LED strip which I think was intended for car use, but I just soldered a molex connector to it and called it a day. The rest of the system is pretty straight forward. Maximus VII Hero, i7 4790k, 16GB of Corsair's Dominator Platinum, and a R9 390x ASUS Direct CU II. In the end I think It left me with a really clean and full setup. Totally the look I was going for.