In what has to be the the speediest CP express post package ever to arrive on my doorstep, I ordered this rad on the 23'rd from dazmode @ mid-day, and it arrived at my door today (25'th). That was the highlight of the build today and then things went downhill.
First off, because of the spacing of the mounts up top WRT the inlet/outlet there'd be no way to mount the rad up there with the fans pulling from inside the case, that's ok I was expecting that, and wasn't even really sure how well the tubing would run that way anywise, but the real kicker was when I attempted to fit a barb onto it once it was installed....
As you can see, there's a clearance issue with the sata power connection of an ODD installed in the upper bay, and from how far out the ODD is, you can see it's a pretty big clearance issue. It's possible that a thin flush mount angled power adapter might work in there (I'm going to see if I can find one), but without something like that, there's no way to get an ODD in that upper bay.... which brings us to the fact that I'm using a two bay res/pump on a case with only 3 5 1/4 bays, and if I move that res to the upper two bays, I'll have no easy access to the fill port.
Soooo..... for now we're going to go sans ODD. I have a USB external, and I've managed to run the power and data cables up under the rad grill so if I want to use a sata ODD (my USB external is not usb3) it's easy enough to hook it up on the top temporarily.
Once I got done calling engineers every dirty name in the book (and a few I had to look up just to be sure... ;) ) I got back to the business of throwing the loop together. Since I was using 3/8 barbs / tubing and had mucked up the first TT loop by making it wayyyyy too loose, I wanted to go the direct opposite and make this loop as tight as possible. I'm relatively pleased with the results, but there is so little play in it, getting much work on the hardware done might require me to break the loop so I wanted an easy way to drain it, hence the drain tube on one of the bottom ports of the vid card in spite of all the good advice I got to the contrary. :)
No leak testing this evening, there's a lot of older untested hardware in the loop so I want to be able to keep a close eye on it rather than letting it run overnight.