I've just completed putting together the "stock air cooling" version of the build, to test all the components and make sure they work. I don't have the sleeving yet and haven't had a chance to flush out all the radiators and install the blocks, so the finished build is still a ways off, but I can at least make sure stuff works right.

My camera battery died about an hour into it, so I don't have pics of every thing. My wife can't find the charger and I haven't messed with it, so I'm not sure how I'm going to get the camera going again.

I have to say, I am liking the Corsair Obsidian 800D for a case. It's very noob friendly and the wire routing seems pretty easy. Everything's black, which I also like a lot. It'll look much better when everything's sleeved and water cooled, though, but that's a ways off I think.

I've had a few mishaps so far. The silverstone power supply doesn't fit into the opening properly. I figured out how to remedy this by loosening the screws around the power entry module and then re-tightening them over the back side of the case. I think I've seen that here somewhere before. I nicked the paint under the entry module with a screwdriver. Yick. Time to buy some black touch-up paint, I guess.

I got distracted when picking up the hybrid silent pipe module on the UD7 motherboard to help with the north bridge cooling. I forgot that I had set all four of the tiny metal screws into the holes on the module. Which sent three of them flying into the deep shag carpet. I spent about an hour hunting for them with a flash light on the desk, under the desk, around the chair, and so on. I found three out of the four screws and decided to just install it minus one screw. Long term, I'll be installing full board water blocks anyways. I probably shouldn't have bought the full board water blocks and just gone with the built-in water cooling. It's even the same size tubing that I'm using for my build already. I could have saved some money there, oh well. I also probably should have gone with stock cooling for the graphics card, I'm just worried that it'll be too noisy. Then I could have cooled just the cpu and the northbridge with water from a triple radiator and the build would have been even easier. But hopefully this will look better and be quieter and thus worth it.

I puzzled over which pin (#1 or #2) was the positive pin for the case power button for a while, so that I could tell which one to plug into the positive terminal on the motherboard. Then I realized that it was a friggin switch, and polarity probably didn't matter at all.

I also forgot to install the front audio before installing the hybrid silent pipe module, so I had to uninstall that again and reinstall it afterwards.

And I didn't get all the correct SATA stuff plugged in before installing the graphics card, so the card had to come back out so I could make one more connection under it.

I've got a nice little collection of stickers provided by the various product manufacturers. Intel core i7 inside. Gigabyte powered. My SSD rocks. Fueled by Sapphire. I wonder where I should stick them? My wife thought that was like the AAA bumper sticker on the back of an automobile. She suggested inside the case panel, so that I could see them if I wanted to but they normally wouldn't be visible. Anyone got a better idea for where to put the stickers? Where the sun don't shine = not an option.

I've determined I don't like the power connector locations on the graphics card. Makes the cables flare way outwards and bend at an awkward angle. Hmm... if only I had a big cylindrical reservoir to wrap them around...

Overall, the stock air cool installation was fairly easy, nothing too tough to do, so I'm enjoying the case so far.

I'm about to power it up for the first time and see from where the big plume of smoke originates....