First PC Build: Corsair 500D RGB SE Push/Pull Custom Loop, i7-9700k, RTX 2080

Profezzional · December 18, 2018

This is an extremely long post, but I feel the need to justify some of the decisions I made here since a couple of them are cringe-worthy, so I want to walk you through my journey with this build. Fair warning: being an engineer, impatient, and having saved up a good bit of money is not a good combination Also, I apologize for the crappy pictures; the only camera I have is my phone, a 6-year-old Galaxy S5

I finished my build in the Corsair 500D SE a couple months ago (specs in my profile); I originally had the 570x but to the 500D SE after a couple weeks because I wanted doors. It's my first PC build, though having dabbled with some hardware stuff in CIS classes in high school, being an IT guy and programmer, and watched a fair bit of YouTube videos on PC builds, I had a rough idea of what I was doing. I did push/pull with Corsair LL 120s and originally used the H150i:

I wanted to go pretty much entirely black with the components (note the painted motherboard bottom heat spreader and I/O cover (I/O shield too)), though some gray/silver/chrome accents, primarily on the the motherboard, were welcome. This way I could change the RGB colors to match whatever I was feeling like on a given day. At the same time though, I wanted to avoid a disco PC, since I've seen some ugly RGB builds out there. I didn't get the LED strips or the top/rear LLs until after the initial build, once I experienced the magic that is iCUE.

I wasn't content with my 2080's noise level when the fans were ramped up, and even though the H150i kept my i7-9700k just under 70C or so under load at stock 4.9GHz, I wanted to go all out with a custom loop. Since I already had the LLs and the return window had passed, I wanted to use them, and so I had the same dilemma of wanting to do push/pull (almost entirely for aesthetic, because the LLs are pretty sexy). I also wanted to go pretty heavy on cooling capacity (I'm overclocking, but not going super hardcore; I mostly wanted a pretty quiet system even under load), so I wanted 360 and 280 rads.

I couldn't figure out how to mount EK's XRES 140 D5 pump combo normally and still have room for push/pull; the PSU shroud goes too far foward to have it on the bottom front fan, and the res was too tall to have it on the middle front fan and have the top rad as well. My other options were to go with a different res/pump combo or separate components, but I couldn't find an easy-enough way to mount those either.

At this point I doubled down, determined to find a way to keep my push/pullI It turned out that while the pump combo wouldn't fit between the PSU shroud and the fan with the mounting holes facing the fan, but it would fit with the mounting holes perpendicular, with a few millimeters to spare (I had about 82mm of clearance, and the pump is 78mm wide):

This renewed my hope, but I couldn't find any brackets that were thin enough to mount the pump to the bottom of the case. Another option I considered was drilling holes and mounting the pump directly to the side of the case, but I wanted to leave that as a last resort. So I decided to get creative and use the CAD skills I learned in my engineering classes to design and 3D-print my own bracket for the pump that would mount to the bottom of the case (the cutout in the support circle was for the cables coming out of the bottom of the pump):

A couple lessons were learned here. One is don't design parts at 3AM on no sleep during midterm exams (the back wall of the bracket was a lot thicker than it needed to be for some reason, so I "had" to drill out those holes a bit for a countersink for the pump screws). Another was to not try so hard to work with what you already have that you choose to drill holes in a part you designed and 3D-printed instead of just buying longer screws for a couple bucks. By the way, I'm using EK's SE 280 and SE 360 radiators. I went with the 28mm-thick rads since the 360 was the same thickness as the H150i's and I had already measured and determined that I could make it work, and since if I went any thicker on the 360 then it'd probably be kind of pointless to get the 280 as well, especially with just the 9700k and a single 2080.

After that ordeal, the bracket fit really well, but I ran into another problem: I couldn't put the front 360 rad in there with the ports at the top, because of the top 240 rad. I also consequently wasn't able to run lines around the pump (I know this isn't a good picture, but it's the only one I took of the pump with it in that spot before I did the rest of the loop):

This seemed to be a show-stopper, especially due to my impatience after having all the necessary parts sitting in my apartment for several days while I waited for the bracket to be printed, then waiting another week for a 2-slot bracket from EVGA to vertically mount the graphics card, so I didn't want to wait several more days to re-print a different part (though I probably should have). So as I was sitting there forlorn, I got looking at the PCIE slot covers, and got an idea (warning: cringe):

After that picture I flipped the brackets the other way and moved them to the bottom screws on the middle fan so the pump is hanging rather than being held up, to get the pump down as far and as close to the top of the PSU shroud as possible, to give myself more room. What is actually kind of cool about using these is the resulting adjustability in the pump position. I do however, fully intend on designing and 3D-printing a new bracket that will let the pump go in the same spot, use the screws from the top of the bottom fan for added support, and go from cringe to cool. Anyway, here's what my end result loop looked like:

This was of course my first time doing a custom loop, and my friend talked me into going with hard tubing (I'm using PETG). Mistakes were made; the bends aren't perfect, and I should have brought the line from the CPU outlet to the pump inlet instead of the top of the res, because currently it's a hassle to fill (I'm probably going to redo that line later). In addition, I probably could have ran the GPU lines in from the front like Corsair did in their build, but I didn't think I could bend that tight. I might still be able to do it with just bends, but I'd rather just do it with fittings. I'm also a noob and at first used the thermal pads that were on the stock EVGA GPU cooler, which are a lot thicker than EK's thermal pads, so the GPU block initially wasn't making contact; I had to do the GPU block twice before I figured that out. Speaking of which, I'm not super happy with the GPU block lighting, since it really only permeates through not quite half of the block (the light on the left in that picture are from the LED strips). Note the lines are cloudy; I'll talk about those in a minute.

For the drain line, I had to get creative again to use the fittings I had after changing my plans with the radiator directions; I have a splitter off one of the ports in the front rad that goes to the GPU inlet and also to a line of soft tubing with a ball valve for draining (another example of in the context of the money spent on the rest of the system, a note to self is don't cheap out on fittings). While tricky to assemble initially (because the soft line runs under the hard line from the other port almost immediately), this makes it actually pretty easy to drain, and the doors hide the drain line decently well. I'm also not sure about the physics of the height of the res in relation to everything else, because when you stop the pump, the res fills back up while I'm assuming the top rad empties.

On a positive note though, I only had one leak that I found pretty quickly and haven't had any issues like that since.

I plan on redoing the lines at some point, probably using 90s at every bend like Corsair did instead of trying to bend things myself. In the meantime, I'm just gonna relax and enjoy the awesome temperatures. I also don't like not being able to control the speeds of the top and rear case fans with iCUE, since I had to plug those straight into the motherboard, so I might have to get a second Commander Pro eventually, which will be tough to fit in there. It'd probably go in the bottom HDD slot, and I'll probably put the Lighting Node Pro in between them, then the lighting hub will go...somewhere else. While I think that I'm getting pretty close to maxing out the capabilities of what the case can handle, it's surprised me how much I've been able to pack in there, given enough time and effort. Cable management with 9 LLs, 4 LED strips, and 4 2.5" drives was definitely a fun challenge (the 4th 2.5" drive is tucked on top of the rats nest behind the power supply), but I'm proud of the job I did:

Because you'll probably ask, yes I have 3 1TB SSDs, because I'm tired of waiting for GTA to load. I've filled up 2TB across my 4 external drives already, so I feel justified in my decision. I've historically had a great experience with Samsung's 860 Evos, and they were on sale during Black Friday. I also have the slow 1TB 2.5" HDD that originally came with my laptop; it's tucked in under the PSU shroud. Probably not the best place for it, but I wanted the 2.5" mounts to all be consistent and pretty.

After the initial assembly of the loop, one problem I had was that the water was extremely bubbly and consequently appeared cloudy while the pump was running. As soon as the pump stopped, it cleared up. I was also getting some foam at the water's surface in the reservoir. The bubbling continued even after letting it aerate for a couple days, and the noise from the water was a bit louder than I wanted. At first I thought maybe the EK-CryoFuel was doing it (I have about a 1:12 mixture since I borrowed the last of my friend's bottle), but before I tried it with just distilled water, I turned the pump down to 50% and the bubbling and noise went away; in the end I'm able to have it up to 65% (around 3275 rpm) before it starts bubbling more and making more noise. This slower also allowed me to aerate it a lot more (notice the difference in the reservoir levels from the photos above and below, I didn't drain or refill the fluid between those pictures). One annoyance is the bubbles that tend to hang out in the top right of the GPU block; I have to tilt the PC forward almost 90 degrees to get those to clear out, and it's gonna take a while to get all the air out of the front rad. So now that the tubes are clear it looks a lot better (notice again how the GPU block's LED color is slightly off; I haven't figured out why yet):

So that's pretty much the entirety of the story with the PC itself. I've dabbled with overclocking it; the CPU seems to handle 5.1GHz fairly well, but I haven't taken the time yet as of this post to massage the voltage enough to get a stable 5.2GHz. I also was able to add around 100MHz to the 2080's core clock and a few hundred to the memory, but I again haven't put the time in yet to get much higher and be stable across different games.

Just for some housekeeping notes, let's talk about the peripherals. I got the Corsair K70 (my first mechanical keyboard experience) because I liked brown switches the best after trying the different kinds for about 3 minutes in the store at the time. In my ignorance of not having put any time into blues or reds, I really like the browns, especially after having come from rubber domes for the past few years. It would have been nice to get the gaming buttons, but as my friend pointed out I probably wouldn't end up using them. The Corsair MM800C is nice; it's been easy to keep clean and is soft enough to be comfortable; I mostly got it for the RGB.

I also like the Corsair Dark Core that I got. I've always been a huge fan of wireless peripherals, and I'm not hardcore into e-sports enough that going wireless would make a noticeable difference. Beyond that, the other reasons I didn't go with something like the G502 was for the relative lack of thumb buttons. I tend to grip the mouse a little harder and have historically ended up not using thumb buttons effectively, while gaming or normal use. I do like the sniper button, and the DPI switching buttons are out of the way but easy to access. The ease of syncing RGB colors was another added bonus. I've always had the wireless receiver in my USB 3.1 port and on 2.4GHz, and plugged it in to the mousepad to charge it, and continued using it, and it's performed fine. As of a few days before this post, however, the Dark Core has been refusing to work when I plug it in; iCUE says it's disconnected. On a random note, my Vengeance RGB Pro RAM has also occasionally given me issues: the LEDs get stuck on whatever color they were last after the PC goes into sleep, then fix themselves after a second sleep cycle; still working on this over on Corsair's forums.

I'm currently using my TV for speakers, $20 earbuds through my gaming monitor, and a $20 desktop mic. I really prefer earbuds over headphones, and I haven't convinced myself I need higher sound quality yet. I'd probably go for the Void Pro, mostly for the RGB sync. I'm using a $50 chair from Staples that's actually really comfortable and I like the shorter back on it.

Ok, now for the last part, the monitors. Full disclosure; I REALLY like monitors. I have 5 (3 x 27" and 2 x 19") at work, which is invaluable to me as a programmer. Even when I'm not coding, it's always helpful to have several screens, like when I'm doing homework or other research, etc. I first got a Samsung 1440p 144hz 27" curved monitor to game on, and I already had a cheap Acer 1080p 60hz 24", as well as a cheap Magnavox 32" 1080p 60hz TV, so this is what I started out with initally, when I had the 570x (laptop also pictured):

My mom got a couple old monitors and an old server machine from a friend whose company abandoned them, and since I was quickly running out of room on my desk, I decided to mount them after I got the 500D. I got an extra tall mount on Amazon for $60, then most of two dual-monitor mounts from my friend and his housemate for a collective $40. I was able to cobble those together, and I was initially fine with it:

After a couple friends made fun of me for how out-of-place the smaller monitor looked, I took advantage of some black Friday deals and got another Samsung 27" curved monitor, this time only 1080p at 60hz, since I didn't want to spend that much, I didn't need another 1440p monitor, and I was only going to game on one:

Yes, that bottom left one is upside down; this was because the VESA mounting holes on the two curved monitors didn't line up at all, and they were a lot closer to being in-line when the one was upside down. Anyway, my friend's housemate works at MicroCenter, and the Friends & Family discount temptation got to be too much, along with the inspiration from SilencedTech's setup. So after I got my watercooling parts, I picked up a second Samsung 27" curved 1080p 60hz monitor. Mounting these suckers was a bit of a challenge. This is an example of where being determined to make something work with what you have actually paid off, albeit with a little cringe. The first challenge was mounting the TV and the 1440p monitor to get them as close to the pole, and hence as far back away from my face, as possible:

The next challenge was when I figured out I didn't quite have the right combination of arm pieces to fit 3 27" curved monitors, so I again had to get creative. Yes, I am going to get proper nuts for these screws, but again, working with what I had because I'm impatient:

As jerryrigged as this is, it does work, at the expense of just a little sag on the right monitor:

Along with some RGB WiFi LED lightbulbs (though one buzzes slightly and the other sometimes flickers), iCUE, and Wallpaper Engine, I can sync the colors of everything with about 30 clicks:

Is this build log long enough yet? Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up. I'd appreciate any constructive criticism anyone can give, although compliments, advice, and praise are preferred I'm also debating what to name the PC, or even if I should; suggestions are welcome, as are tips for improvement or cheap upgrades, etc.

r2724r16 · December 18, 2018

That's a really nice looking build, especially for someone building one for the first time!

LaserLion · December 19, 2018

Mission accomplished!...Though, the mission is never truly over, now is it?

Connor_LindTV · December 19, 2018

21 hours ago, Profezzional said:

This is an extremely long post, but I feel the need to justify some of the decisions I made here since a couple of them are cringe-worthy, so I want to walk you through my journey with this build. Fair warning: being an engineer, impatient, and having saved up a good bit of money is not a good combination Also, I apologize for the crappy pictures; the only camera I have is my phone, a 6-year-old Galaxy S5

I finished my initial build in the Corsair 500D SE a couple months ago (specs in my profile); I originally had the 570x but swapped it after a couple weeks because I wanted doors. It's my first PC build, though having dabbled with some hardware stuff in CIS classes in high school, being an IT guy and programmer, and watched a fair bit of YouTube videos on PC builds, I had a rough idea of what I was doing. I did push/pull with Corsair LL 120s and originally using the H150i:

I wanted to go pretty much entirely black with the components (note the painted motherboard bottom heat spreader and I/O cover (I/O shield too)), though some gray/silver/chrome accents, primarily on the the motherboard, were welcome. This way I could change the RGB colors to match whatever I was feeling like on a given day. At the same time though, I wanted to avoid a disco PC, since I've seen some ugly RGB builds out there. I didn't get the LED strips or the top/rear LLs until after the initial build, once I experienced the magic that is iCUE.

I wasn't content with my 2080's noise level when the fans were ramped up, and even though the H150i kept my i7-9700k just under 70C or so under load at stock 4.9GHz, I wanted to go all out with a custom loop. Since I already had the LLs and the return window had passed, I wanted to use them, and so I had the same dilemma of wanting to do push/pull (almost entirely for aesthetic, because the LLs are pretty sexy). I also wanted to go pretty heavy on cooling capacity (I'm overclocking, but not going super hardcore; I mostly wanted a pretty quiet system even under load), so I wanted 360 and 280 rads.

I couldn't figure out how to mount EK's XRES 140 D5 pump combo normally and still have room for push/pull; the PSU shroud goes too far foward to have it on the bottom front fan, and the res was too tall to have it on the middle front fan and have the top rad as well. My other options were to go with a different res/pump combo or separate components, but I couldn't find an easy-enough way to mount those either.

At this point I doubled down, determined to find a way to keep my push/pullI It turned out that while the pump combo wouldn't fit between the PSU shroud and the fan with the mounting holes facing the fan, but it would fit with the mounting holes perpendicular, with a few millimeters to spare (I had about 82mm of clearance, and the pump is 78mm wide):

This renewed my hope, but I couldn't find any brackets that were thin enough to mount the pump to the bottom of the case. Another option I considered was drilling holes and mounting the pump directly to the side of the case, but I wanted to leave that as a last resort. So I decided to get creative and use the CAD skills I learned in my engineering classes to design and 3D-print my own bracket for the pump that would mount to the bottom of the case (the cutout in the support circle was for the cables coming out of the bottom of the pump):

A couple lessons were learned here. One is don't design parts at 3AM on no sleep during midterm exams (the back wall of the bracket was a lot thicker than it needed to be for some reason, so I "had" to drill out those holes a bit for a countersink for the pump screws). Another was to not try so hard to work with what you already have that you choose to drill holes in a part you designed and 3D-printed instead of just buying longer screws for a couple bucks. By the way, I'm using EK's SE 280 and SE 360 radiators. I went with the 28mm-thick rads since the 360 was the same thickness as the H150i's and I had already measured and determined that I could make it work, and since if I went any thicker on the 360 then it'd probably be kind of pointless to get the 280 as well, especially with just the 9700k and a single 2080.

After that ordeal, the bracket fit really well, but I ran into another problem: I couldn't put the front 360 rad in there with the ports at the top, because of the top 240 rad. I also consequently wasn't able to run lines around the pump (I know this isn't a good picture, but it's the only one I took of the pump with it in that spot before I did the rest of the loop):

This seemed to be a show-stopper, especially due to my impatience after having all the necessary parts sitting in my apartment for several days while I waited for the bracket to be printed, then waiting another week for a 2-slot bracket from EVGA to vertically mount the graphics card, so I didn't want to wait several more days to re-print a different part (though I probably should have). So as I was sitting there forlorn, I got looking at the PCIE slot covers, and got an idea (warning: cringe):

After that picture I flipped the brackets the other way and moved them to the bottom screws on the middle fan so the pump is hanging rather than being held up, to get the pump down as far and as close to the top of the PSU shroud as possible, to give myself more room. What is actually kind of cool about using these is the resulting adjustability in the pump position. I do however, fully intend on designing and 3D-printing a new bracket that will let the pump go in the same spot, use the screws from the top of the bottom fan for added support, and go from cringe to cool. Anyway, here's what my end result loop looked like:

This was of course my first time doing a custom loop, and my friend talked me into going with hard tubing (I'm using PETG). Mistakes were made; the bends aren't perfect, and I should have brought the line from the CPU outlet to the pump inlet instead of the top of the res, because currently it's a hassle to fill (I'm probably going to redo that line later). In addition, I probably could have ran the GPU lines in from the front like Corsair did in their build, but I didn't think I could bend that tight. I might still be able to do it with just bends, but I'd rather just do it with fittings. I'm also a noob and at first used the thermal pads that were on the stock EVGA GPU cooler, which are a lot thicker than EK's thermal pads, so the GPU block initially wasn't making contact; I had to do the GPU block twice before I figured that out. Speaking of which, I'm not super happy with the GPU block lighting, since it really only permeates through not quite half of the block (the light on the left in that picture are from the LED strips). Note the lines are cloudy; I'll talk about those in a minute.

For the drain line, I had to get creative again to use the fittings I had after changing my plans with the radiator directions; I have a splitter off one of the ports in the front rad that goes to the GPU inlet and also to a line of soft tubing with a ball valve for draining (another example of in the context of the money spent on the rest of the system, a note to self is don't cheap out on fittings). While tricky to assemble initially (because the soft line runs under the hard line from the other port almost immediately), this makes it actually pretty easy to drain, and the doors hide the drain line decently well. I'm also not sure about the physics of the height of the res in relation to everything else, because when you stop the pump, the res fills back up while I'm assuming the top rad empties.

On a positive note though, I only had one leak that I found pretty quickly and haven't had any issues like that since.

I plan on redoing the lines at some point, probably using 90s at every bend like Corsair did instead of trying to bend things myself. In the meantime, I'm just gonna relax and enjoy the awesome temperatures. I also don't like not being able to control the speeds of the top and rear case fans with iCUE, since I had to plug those straight into the motherboard, so I might have to get a second Commander Pro eventually, which will be tough to fit in there. It'd probably go in the bottom HDD slot, and I'll probably put the Lighting Node Pro in between them, then the lighting hub will go...somewhere else. While I think that I'm getting pretty close to maxing out the capabilities of what the case can handle, it's surprised me how much I've been able to pack in there, given enough time and effort. Cable management with 9 LLs, 4 LED strips, and 4 2.5" drives was definitely a fun challenge (the 4th 2.5" drive is tucked on top of the rats nest behind the power supply), but I'm proud of the job I did:

Because you'll probably ask, yes I have 3 1TB SSDs, because I'm tired of waiting for GTA to load. I've filled up 2TB across my 4 external drives already, so I feel justified in my decision. I've historically had a great experience with Samsung's 860 Evos, and they were on sale during Black Friday. I also have the slow 1TB 2.5" HDD that originally came with my laptop; it's tucked in under the PSU shroud. Probably not the best place for it, but I wanted the 2.5" mounts to all be consistent and pretty.

After the initial assembly of the loop, one problem I had was that the water was extremely bubbly and consequently appeared cloudy while the pump was running. As soon as the pump stopped, it cleared up. I was also getting some foam at the water's surface in the reservoir. The bubbling continued even after letting it aerate for a couple days, and the noise from the water was a bit louder than I wanted. At first I thought maybe the EK-CryoFuel was doing it (I have about a 1:12 mixture since I borrowed the last of my friend's bottle), but before I tried it with just distilled water, I turned the pump down to 50% and the bubbling and noise went away; in the end I'm able to have it up to 65% (around 3275 rpm) before it starts bubbling more and making more noise. This slower also allowed me to aerate it a lot more (notice the difference in the reservoir levels from the photos above and below, I didn't drain or refill the fluid between those pictures). One annoyance is the bubbles that tend to hang out in the top right of the GPU block; I have to tilt the PC forward almost 90 degrees to get those to clear out, and it's gonna take a while to get all the air out of the front rad. So now that the tubes are clear it looks a lot better (notice again how the GPU block's LED color is slightly off; I haven't figured out why yet):

So that's pretty much the entirety of the story with the PC itself. I've dabbled with overclocking it; the CPU seems to handle 5.1GHz fairly well, but I haven't taken the time yet as of this post to massage the voltage enough to get a stable 5.2GHz. I also was able to add around 100MHz to the 2080's core clock and a few hundred to the memory, but I again haven't put the time in yet to get much higher and be stable across different games.

Just for some housekeeping notes, let's talk about the peripherals. I got the Corsair K70 (my first mechanical keyboard experience) because I liked brown switches the best after trying the different kinds for about 3 minutes in the store at the time. In my ignorance of not having put any time into blues or reds, I really like the browns, especially after having come from rubber domes for the past few years. It would have been nice to get the gaming buttons, but as my friend pointed out I probably wouldn't end up using them. The Corsair MM800C is nice; it's been easy to keep clean and is soft enough to be comfortable; I mostly got it for the RGB.

I also like the Corsair Dark Core that I got. I've always been a huge fan of wireless peripherals, and I'm not hardcore into e-sports enough that going wireless would make a noticeable difference. Beyond that, the other reasons I didn't go with something like the G502 was for the relative lack of thumb buttons. I tend to grip the mouse a little harder and have historically ended up not using thumb buttons effectively, while gaming or normal use. I do like the sniper button, and the DPI switching buttons are out of the way but easy to access. The ease of syncing RGB colors was another added bonus. I've always had the wireless receiver in my USB 3.1 port and on 2.4GHz, and plugged it in to the mousepad to charge it, and continued using it, and it's performed fine. As of a few days before this post, however, the Dark Core has been refusing to work when I plug it in; iCUE says it's disconnected. On a random note, my Vengeance RGB Pro RAM has also occasionally given me issues: the LEDs get stuck on whatever color they were last after the PC goes into sleep, then fix themselves after a second sleep cycle; still working on this over on Corsair's forums.

I'm currently using my TV for speakers, $20 earbuds through my gaming monitor, and a $20 desktop mic. I really prefer earbuds over headphones, and I haven't convinced myself I need higher sound quality yet. I'd probably go for the Void Pro, mostly for the RGB sync. I'm using a $50 chair from Staples that's actually really comfortable and I like the shorter back on it.

Ok, now for the last part, the monitors. Full disclosure; I REALLY like monitors. I have 5 (3 x 27" and 2 x 19") at work, which is invaluable to me as a programmer. Even when I'm not coding, it's always helpful to have several screens, like when I'm doing homework or other research, etc. I first got a Samsung 1440p 144hz 27" curved monitor to game on, and I already had a cheap Acer 1080p 60hz 24", as well as a cheap Magnavox 32" 1080p 60hz TV, so this is what I started out with initally, when I had the 570x (laptop also pictured):

My mom got a couple old monitors and an old server machine from a friend whose company abandoned them, and since I was quickly running out of room on my desk, I decided to mount them after I got the 500D. I got an extra tall mount on Amazon for $60, then most of two dual-monitor mounts from my friend and his housemate for a collective $40. I was able to cobble those together, and I was initially fine with it:

After a couple friends made fun of me for how out-of-place the smaller monitor looked, I took advantage of some black Friday deals and got another Samsung 27" curved monitor, this time only 1080p at 60hz, since I didn't want to spend that much, I didn't need another 1440p monitor, and I was only going to game on one:

Yes, that bottom left one is upside down; this was because the VESA mounting holes on the two curved monitors didn't line up at all, and they were a lot closer to being in-line when the one was upside down. Anyway, my friend's housemate works at MicroCenter, and the Friends & Family discount temptation got to be too much, along with the inspiration from SilencedTech's setup. So after I got my watercooling parts, I picked up a second Samsung 27" curved 1080p 60hz monitor. Mounting these suckers was a bit of a challenge. This is an example of where being determined to make something work with what you have actually paid off, albeit with a little cringe. The first challenge was mounting the TV and the 1440p monitor to get them as close to the pole, and hence as far back away from my face, as possible:

The next challenge was when I figured out I didn't quite have the right combination of arm pieces to fit 3 27" curved monitors, so I again had to get creative. Yes, I am going to get proper nuts for these screws, but again, working with what I had because I'm impatient:

As jerryrigged as this is, it does work, at the expense of just a little sag on the right monitor:

Along with some RGB WiFi LED lightbulbs (though one buzzes slightly and the other sometimes flickers), iCUE, and Wallpaper Engine, I can sync the colors of everything with about 30 clicks:

Is this build log long enough yet? Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up. I'd appreciate any constructive criticism anyone can give, although compliments, advice, and praise are preferred I'm also debating what to name the PC, or even if I should; suggestions are welcome, as are tips for improvement or cheap upgrades, etc.

i would drag body parts through Texas sized deserts filed with broken glass, used nails and legos for that setup...

Profezzional · December 21, 2018

Update: I managed to fit another Commander Pro in there. The cable management isn't quite as pretty, but its still pretty good I think. Especially for having 9 2-wire fans, 2 RGB water blocks, a RGB pump, 4 LED strips, 2 Commander Pros, 2 LED fan hubs, a Lighting Node Pro, and 4 2.5" drives. It's really satisfying looking at it now that it's done.

LaserLion · December 21, 2018

Honestly, the cable management in your original post was pretty good considering all of the connections you had to deal with. You really sold the potential of that case. Speaking of which, I find the wording in your original first paragraph slightly confusing so I just want to clarify: The final build is taking place in the Corsair 500D SE, yes?

Personally, I loved the PCIE slot bracket work-around. Yes, it is cringy; it is also an innovative, practical use for a component that comes with the case. I like it when we can find creative ways to fix minor issues with what we've already been given.

Maybe I missed it, but have you dabbled with overclocking your GPU yet?

Profezzional · December 22, 2018

Sorry for the confusing wording; the final build is in the 500D SE, yes.

Also forgot to include an image with the last update:

The bottom left corner is a little messy, but il'll take it.

I've dabbled with overclocking the GPU, but haven't gotten a ton of performance out of it. I was only able to get about 100MHz core clock improvement (from 1935MHz to 2040MHz) and 500MHz memory clock boost (7000MHz to 7500MHz) and still have Time Spy be stable, but I couldn't get Crysis stable with it so I'm just leaving it at the base clocks for now, until I work my way through the earlier games in series and actually get to the demanding titles.