Troika

I mainly use the hood on my stove whenever I boil water or searing a steak because that can be a pretty smokey affair.

Good news! Alphacool got back to me this morning saying they'll refund me the cost of the reservoir and compensate me 100€ for damages. 😄 I really wasn't expecting much to happen but good on Alphacool! I'll be putting those funds into getting a new X58 board. Now to decide which one. A Rampage III seems like the obvious goto for a very high end board but is it really that good?

I am the big sad today. My MSI X58 Big Bang xPower had passed away. The Alphacool Eisstation I was using for the waterloop leaked onto the board and shorted something. The board doesn't power on anymore and I don't know if the memory is ok or its fried too. I contacted Alphacool yesterday since the res is only about two months old and one of the plugs that were installed in the pump compartment from the factory had been cracked internally. I'm not expecting much but I hope they can do something for me.
 
On a unrelated note, my main rig is getting a new motherboard today because the B450 Steel Legend board that's currently in it has periodic seizures and crashes in various ways.

Good news! Alphacool got back to me this morning saying they'll refund me the cost of the reservoir and compensate me 100€ for damages. 😄 I really wasn't expecting much to happen but good on Alphacool! I'll be putting those funds into getting a new X58 board. Now to decide which one. A Rampage III seems like the obvious goto for a very high end board but is it really that good?

Good news! Alphacool got back to me this morning saying they'll refund me the cost of the reservoir and compensate me 100€ for damages. 😄 I really wasn't expecting much to happen but good on Alphacool! I'll be putting those funds into getting a new X58 board. Now to decide which one. A Rampage III seems like the obvious goto for a very high end board but is it really that good?

Should be. I had 0 issues with my Rampage III Formula, Extreme should only be better. I'm partial to EVGA Classified boards but the BIOS has a shittier layout and color scheme.

Good news! Alphacool got back to me this morning saying they'll refund me the cost of the reservoir and compensate me 100€ for damages. 😄 I really wasn't expecting much to happen but good on Alphacool! I'll be putting those funds into getting a new X58 board. Now to decide which one. A Rampage III seems like the obvious goto for a very high end board but is it really that good?

Good news! Alphacool got back to me this morning saying they'll refund me the cost of the reservoir and compensate me 100€ for damages. 😄 I really wasn't expecting much to happen but good on Alphacool! I'll be putting those funds into getting a new X58 board. Now to decide which one. A Rampage III seems like the obvious goto for a very high end board but is it really that good?

I am the big sad today. My MSI X58 Big Bang xPower had passed away. The Alphacool Eisstation I was using for the waterloop leaked onto the board and shorted something. The board doesn't power on anymore and I don't know if the memory is ok or its fried too. I contacted Alphacool yesterday since the res is only about two months old and one of the plugs that were installed in the pump compartment from the factory had been cracked internally. I'm not expecting much but I hope they can do something for me.
 
On a unrelated note, my main rig is getting a new motherboard today because the B450 Steel Legend board that's currently in it has periodic seizures and crashes in various ways.

I am the big sad today. My MSI X58 Big Bang xPower had passed away. The Alphacool Eisstation I was using for the waterloop leaked onto the board and shorted something. The board doesn't power on anymore and I don't know if the memory is ok or its fried too. I contacted Alphacool yesterday since the res is only about two months old and one of the plugs that were installed in the pump compartment from the factory had been cracked internally. I'm not expecting much but I hope they can do something for me.
 
On a unrelated note, my main rig is getting a new motherboard today because the B450 Steel Legend board that's currently in it has periodic seizures and crashes in various ways.

Nope, just an internal USB2 header. It's a fully self contained system that doesn't rely on the motherboard or motherboards RGB software to function. 

Corsair, NZXT, Cooler Master, Lian Li just to name a few rely on their own controller for ARGB and all support PWM fans. 

yeah its annoying

I hate to toot my own horn here but I figured this would be  the perfect opportunity to brag about my new build.

S'not really a "basement" persay. Its more like a positionable cover that can be adjusted by undoing a pair of thumb screws, or in my case, a single one cause I seem to have lost the other one. It is nice to be able to hide all the psu cables even in a decade year old case! 😄 I can't say its super standard but If I had to hazard a guess based on the other legacy case I have, a CM Cosmos II, it was probably a feature only really seen in large cases with E-ATX or SSI-EEB/SSI-CEB motherboard support. Despite its solid steel panel, its cool to see that mid towers back in that era were as full featured as full towers are now. From what I could gather, the retail price of the HAF XM when it was new was $129.99 USD. That puts it solidly in the higher end case category. Granted, I paid $50 for it from a guy that had it locally about five years ago. I'm pretty happy with that purchase, its a solid case that I'll probably find very hard to replace.

S'not really a "basement" persay. Its more like a positionable cover that can be adjusted by undoing a pair of thumb screws, or in my case, a single one cause I seem to have lost the other one. It is nice to be able to hide all the psu cables even in a decade year old case! 😄 I can't say its super standard but If I had to hazard a guess based on the other legacy case I have, a CM Cosmos II, it was probably a feature only really seen in large cases with E-ATX or SSI-EEB/SSI-CEB motherboard support. Despite its solid steel panel, its cool to see that mid towers back in that era were as full featured as full towers are now. From what I could gather, the retail price of the HAF XM when it was new was $129.99 USD. That puts it solidly in the higher end case category. Granted, I paid $50 for it from a guy that had it locally about five years ago. I'm pretty happy with that purchase, its a solid case that I'll probably find very hard to replace.

Have seen as cheap as 3,50 but that is about it. 8 isn't a odd price.

I see I see. I can't really do anything to fit a rad at the front because I'm actually using the drive sleds to hold 4x4TB drives and my pump/res currently lives on a hotswap drive sled and sits in the 5.25" bays. (Yes I know the res cap is crooked in the picture, I've fixed it since then. The pictures were also taken a few months ago during a test fit and leak test of the system.)

The build pictured is also my Ryzen rig that's currently living in that case. It'll be moved out into a different case soon as I want the X58 system to live in this case.

This is also my first loop but I think I did an ok job. There's stuff I probably would have done differently but for now, it works just fine. The fluid is distilled water with 15% of the volume being antifreeze and about 50ml of colloidal silver.
 

-> Moved to Custom Loop and Exotic Cooling

I run a fully looped PC in a CoolerMaster HAF XM and the 200mm side intake does not interfere with it.
 
I personally mounted an 80mm arctic F8 above the VRMs on my board (still have a 240mm rad up top too) blowing air straight down on it.
 
What do you mean compatible side panel?  
 
EDIT - it is literally pressed outward to have space for all of this that you are talking about - probably one of the most versatile cases Ive had the pleasure to work in lol - theres like 14 fans in it right now or more I lost count 

There's quite a bit to go over here.
Don't use motherboard RAID. If you want to use hardware based RAID get a proper RAID card. Also motherboard RAID at least on an old chipset like that doesn't support cache disks though you might be able to set that up in software (your OS). For your pool I would recommend using ZFS or UNRAID instead of hardware RAID. ZFS doesn't support cache disks that will speed up the pool instead it uses RAM as a write cache. UNRAID doesn't actually RAID the drives it keeps full files on each disk but does support SSD caching so you can get quick write performance. The OS costs money though. RAID5 you can lose up to 1 disk per array. RAID10 you can lose up to 2, not 1 since you need a minimum of 4 disks and data is split then mirrored across them. Note though you can't lose any 2 of the 4. If you lose 2 of the same set of data all data is lost. You might like to checkout a hypervisor OS. Look-up PROXMOX. I do have to say I don't recommend virtualizing pfSense. When the server goes down for maintenance or a problem (which WILL happen) so will your router. Your whole house will lose Internet. pfSense is one of those appliances that really deserve a dedicated box.

Mixing drives of different brands or batches is actually a practice done in the enterprise to minimize the likelihood of catastrophic failure. So long as the disks are the same capacity & RPM you have nothing to worry about in that regard.
 
Reasons to not use slower drives is it would slow down the pools overall performance. Doing a RAID0 between a HDD & an SSD would only ~ double the performance of the HDD because it's the slowest disk in the array so if it can be helped match RPMs. Matching cache (64MB/128MB/etc) isn't as big a deal depending on your application.
 
IMO, if it's only a few disks and you're on a budget consider shucking drives like WD Elementals. If you want NAS/Server rated drives I can vouch for the Seagate Ironwolfs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm working off of what I've been told. I don't have first hand experience here. If I could remember the sources where I was told this I'd link them.

It's for a remote management card like this
 

I couldn't successfully clock my ram up to 2400mhz no matter what I did in the bios but I did just break 1k cb on r15!

It might have been the slight adjustment to the timings. I had 11-13-13-31 3T before. I'm on 11-11-11-28 1T.