First Time WCing - TJ04?

TheAdmiralty · April 17, 2015

Evening, gentlemen! My first post here at the community - may as well make it one which will involve emptying my bank account. I come here a long time contributor to TomsHardware, which has sadly turned some bastard child of an Apple Advertisement and Yahoo! Answers-in-broken-English at this point. I remember back when their news feed actually consisted of hardware reviews, too...

Anyway, I have a Xeon E3-1240 in a mini-ITX system, plus one GTX 980 running a 4K display. It's a nice little setup, but I plan on expanding quite a few things and have also decided to venture into the world of watercooling for the first time.

I've always loved Silverstone's cases, and Linus's own TJ07 build is what set me out on this little adventure in the first place. No plastic on my cases. Right now, my plans are to rebuild into a smaller TJ04 - I have size limitations such that I'm stuck with a case at 20" deep or less, for... reasons... but I have a plan. I'm looking at a single loop cooling a processor that dissipates negligible heat and will never be overclocked, and a single GTX 980 - probably two in the future. Nothing too bad.

Pulling the HDD cage, I could mount an EK pump/res combo to one of the side 120mm fan mounts with their little 90-degree bracket, or probably just velcro it to the floor, and run a 240mm radiator on the top panel as exhaust. My problem right here is that it looks like an extremely close fit up top; I bet I could get everything mounted with the in/out ports facing the rear of the case (looking at this image), but I don't want to wager $500 of watercooling equpment and $150 of case on "it looks like it might fit". All that aside, if a rad would actually fit up there, I could probably come up with a really nice system; I have a four-HDD RAID5 array of HGST drives that would go in a 3x 5.25"-bay hotswap cage right below an ODD; red dye, clear tubing, 32 gigs of red RipjawsX + one M.2 drive on an Asus Z97-WS and I think I'll be set for a few years. Yep, my college student budget is definitely going to be hurting in the near future.

And so, as a total newbie to the watercooling world, I bring you this:

Now, I have several questions. First and foremost, does anyone have any experience with the TJ04, or an actual case that they could measure the clearance between the rearmost 120mm fan mounting hole and the rear of the case? Now, when it comes to the cart I just linked to, there are several things I'm not entirely sure of. Manufacturer preferences aside I like what I have there, but my main concern lies in the actual water in the watercooling loop... I'm told dyes and coolants are either 1) worthless, 2) destructive to your loop, or 3) the most amazing thing ever made by mankind, depending on who you ask. There seem to be a lot of mixed opinions on this... would EK's Blood-Red additive (which I love, by the way) be a worthwhile way to get my red coolant, or should I avoid this and/or go with something else? Would it stop biological growth, or do I need something extra? Next question: is there any significant difference in radiator manufacturer? There seems to be an identifically priced, identically-specced radiator from every manufacturer out there, and I really can't tell the difference. Lastly, this. Now, I refuse to believe that EK makes a product that will ruin your equipment. I read over at Overclock.net that junk tubing is the real cause of this, and I'm inclined to believe them; now I have to ask whether or not the tubing EK sells is also worthwhile.

So much hardware out there for a newcomer. I've been aircooling for every build I've ever done, and I'm really looking forward to this. Any opinions or comments are welcomed! Hopefully a few of you at least stuck it out through my wall of text. :mellow:

Much appreciated,

-TheAdmiralty