Component Installation, Continued

We shot the preceding photo after also installing the motherboard tray, so let's back up a little.

After applying thermal paste to the top of the CPU, we installed the Swiftech Apogee Drive CPU cooler. While some thermal paste brands recommend scraping off any excess, this editor instead applies small dots of paste and flattens it out with a test fit of the cooling device. The result is less wasted paste, and the layer is still thin enough to see through (though it will "squash out" thinner over time).

The screws of the Apogee Drive on top of the motherboard engage in the threaded holes of the support plate beneath. The support plate uses a self-adhesive foam insulator sheet, but we left the backing on the adhesive to ease later removal.

With the Apogee Drive installed, the motherboard can be screwed onto tray standoffs.

Sliding the motherboard tray back into the Temjin TJ09 chassis allowed hoses to be routed from the two radiators to the Apogee Drive. We installed the graphics cards first to make sure the hoses were long enough to route around them, and also installed the drives to check cable routing.

One might think that the system looks nearly finished, but there was still one unavoidable step: we had to remove the Apogee Drive from the motherboard and slide the motherboard tray back out of the chassis in order to fill the liquid cooling system. The double-fan radiator also had to be removed, and both units were placed below the height of the remaining radiator.

The cooling system was topped up with a mixture of distilled water and Swiftech coolant additive. Tipping the larger radiator and Apogee Drive in various directions while holding them beneath the smaller radiator allowed air bubbles to rise and escape through the reservoir's fill hole.

Next, we installed the chipset/RAM cooling fan and cables, and replaced the side panels. Our build was ready for software.