First PC watercooling build.

[vijayellu]

Hey guys! After years of drooling over pictures of cool builds online, I finally got to build a decent Watercooled pc! I'm not new to pc building, have been doing it for years now. But I was a total watercooling noob.
Started off by reading the stickies in this forum and many others. I should say all those helped immensely in understanding the nuances of watercooling. Shout out to users Ghost and Whaler for the super helpful FAQ sticky. I found myself coming back to it more often than not to check if I'm on the right track.

When I started this, I had most of the components. Here are the ones I had and the ones I bought.

 

****************HAD**************** 
ASRock Z77 Extreme 4
i3770k @ 3.50GHz
Corsair vengeance 2x 8gb
Coolermaster Thunder 700w
1x Western Digital Green 2TB HDD
1x Seagate 1TB HDD
Galaxy 660Ti 2gb
Coolermaster HAF912
 
****************BOUGHT****************  
Evga 980Ti
Fractal define S
Samsung 850 Evo 250gb
Corsair SP120
EKWB water loop components http://i.imgur.com/Lhf8vC1.jpg
Since this was my first build, i thought i would go for a kit. But every kit i checked had something that i didnt particularly like or prefer. For instance most of the ekwb kits came with a 240 rad. The Extreme kit  that came with a 360 rad would not fit in my case since its really really thick. Small things like this made me pick all the components i wanted individually. Thankfully i ordered extra fittings and cable so i was able to make up for my mistakes.
 
Here is the album: http://imgur.com/a/IB5sf
The album is sorted in the order that i set this up and it has captions for the most part.

 But somethings that i did wrong/learnt along the way were:
** Made the mistake of reading the pump manual wrong. As you can clearly see here http://i.imgur.com/uejGHa0.jpg i swapped the inlet and outlets since the tubing looked more clean that way. Few seconds after i turned on the pump for the first time i realised it and turned it off immediately. The pump ran dry for a second. Thankfully it seems to run smoothly, so dodged a bullet there!
** Cable sleeving!! I am confused what i should do with this one really. I want to slap on another 980Ti there soon. That would mean more power and changing the power supply. Or i just do the sleeving for the heck of it! Either ways, thats the only thing i am not happy in this build with how it looks.
** Compression fittings are a bitch to put on! Is this just me? I felt like even after i had turned the compression part as much it goes with my hand, it always seems to turn more when i try it a minute later. And the fact that they were so tight to turn caused this bend http://i.imgur.com/4Za9E6O.jpg . The tube turned along with the compression fitting for about half a circle causing that bend.
** Some inlets were not where i would liked them to be! For instance initially i wanted to have the inlet for the reservoir at the top, and i wanted the outlet of the res straight into the pump. Like i mentioned earlier, that didnt go so well.
** Drain port. I did not plan this ahead, which was clearly a mistake. Had to drain twice when doing this because i kept making mistakes. Both times i opened the top lid and turned it around into a jar, and then blew into a pipe to get all the remaining liquid out. If i wanted, i could have made a drain loop since i had the necessary fittings, but that would have meant leaving a tube dangling somewhere. Didnt want to ruin the aesthetics. 
** Learnt to solder as well, since i had to do some tinkering with the bottom led strip to daisy chain it http://i.imgur.com/eO85rz0.jpg . This was because there is no additional space on the Define S at the bottom to stick one full length led strip. I could do that on the top though.
 
All in all this was an amazing experience for me and i would definitely like to hear from you guys.

[robert1339]

Looks sick!
Hopefully in the future I can water cool my PC and add some LED strips all around but I have no place for a reservoir in my case so I gotta buy a new case first.

[Guest Johnny5g]

if you can think about kits again xspc makes good kits i hear.

good luck.

[Watercooler970]

Great build! Pretty similar to my upcoming loop