Waterworks
That’s it, then. We’re done, wrapped up, finished. Or are we? No. There’s plenty more to do. We ended up taking three days to build this rig. Even with the help of pro-modder (and Alphacool’s marketing rep) Dave Alcock, it took nearly twice as long as we expected. And there are still erroneous parts and little niggles to tweak to make this rig really shine.
First on the block are those Alphacool radiators. There are two annoyances here: the bottom radiator’s logo is upside down, and the logos are blue. To get around this, we’re going to get some red vinyl Alphacool labels printed up, which we can overlay on them.
Next on the list is the memory. In the end, HyperX couldn’t get the kit we wanted to us in time. No one’s at fault, as it was down to an erroneous shipping delay handled by a thirdparty courier. Because of that, we had no choice but to lean on 16GB (2x 8GB) of Corsair’s Dominator Platinum DDR4 @ 3,200MT/s for this build, fitted with a couple of lightbar upgrades. But again, silver and white doesn’t match our build, and that spec isn’t the 32GB we’d hoped for, so a quick pitch to Corsair may be in the pipeline. To cure the silver and white bars on top, CableMod sells a black variant of the lightbar upgrade kit, with a red LED strip in the middle, too, so that should help smarten up the interior a little.
There’s a lot we can do with the cable management in the back, too, as we were up against the wire here, so that’s going to be addressed almost immediately. We’ve also got to find a plan for our simple six-way XSPC fan controller. And the magnetic LED strip we’ve hidden in the front corner of the chassis needs a stronger form of adhesive, Velcro perhaps, as the aluminium support bar isn’t magnetic.
Lastly, there are some loop tweaks we could do. There’s not a lot we’d change here; perhaps sand down the radiator end of the GPU tube, to bring the angle down a touch, and work on a fancier length of frosted tubing to connect the CPU and the top radiator together, perhaps consisting of two 90-degree bends, and reducing our reliance on fittings.
All that aside, and the frustration, delays, and massive effort involved from everyone on the team, we’re immensely proud of this build. It’s cool, quiet, and lovely to look at, even with its flaws. It performs like a trouper, and absolutely kicks butt. There’ll be more of this beauty (hopefully with all the tweaks) in a later issue, including the final desk build and peripheral setup, so keep an eye out!