Premium Build: Greyscale — building a custom-looped ITX PC that pushes the form factor to its limits

Although the NCase M3 is small, this configuration left me with a handful of cavities for cable management. There’s one between the motherboard and the top radiator that extends over to the top of the PSU, a big one below the motherboard, in the space between the 280mm bottom radiator and the case, another behind this same radiator, and below the power supply.

I removed the heatsink from the SSD to run a few of the RGB cables out of sight through a gap between the graphics card and the motherboard. Of course, removing the GPU would be less tedious, but with how the NCase’s rear bracket is made, it would take longer, so I opted to do it this way and fish with tweezers to get them through.

I was able to tidy all up in the space between the motherboard and the top radiator, and at the bottom of the system behind the 280mm radiator, for a surprisingly tidy end-result.

I was happy with how it looked, even inside the main cavity. Yes, the CPU power cable was too short, but by angling it in a way to block the least amount of airflow, it also wasn’t all that bothersome visually. I also opted to route the GPU’s power cable over and behind, as although underneath the GPU would have looked better, it would have impacted airflow in that area.

This is what money is for right? To solve problems.

The GPU also needed an anti-sag bracket, but I had none in this size. I looked around my office, and grabbed a few coins from my coin jar that I could use as shims. Later, I cut a bit of leftover tubing to the right height and used that instead.

The system was looking sleek, and ready for tubing. However, there was one thing I wanted to do first.

Remember what I said about not running the system without coolant? Well, it turns out I’m not a man of my word. Once the cooling loop would be installed, fixing any issues would become a real pain, so I decided that it would be okay to run it for a few seconds, just to double-check that post appears on the monitor, and that all the RGB and fans were connected before proceeding.

Monitoring temperatures in the timeframe here is not something you can do – by the time you get into the right window in the BIOS, or windows, the system is likely already too hot.

Instead, you can listen to the fans – if they start spinning at full speed, you know the CPU, and by extension, likely the GPU, are too hot for comfort, and you want to shut the PC off right before this happens. This takes about 30 seconds though, which is more than enough to check whether everything is working as intended.