For my latest build, I finally made the switch from soft tubes to hard tubes (acrylic to be exact) and am thoroughly satisfied with the results, both aesthetically and temperature-wise. Despite the initial trepidation of not being sure if I was doing it correctly, I slowly gained confidence using the heat gun to make my bends, the hack saw to cut the tubes to size, and the electric drill with a special bit to deburr their edges. The following are the parts I have used thus far, with a possible modification to the CPU in the near future (I want to delid it and place the CPU heatsink right on top of it with quality TIM (Thermal Interface Material)).

• Asus Rampage VI Extreme Omega motherboard featuring the Intel X299 chipset with an E-ATX form factor (Click to view on Newegg)
• Intel Core i9-10980XE Skylake-X 18-cores, 36-threads at 3.0 GHz default clock (4.8 GHz turbo) with a LGA 2066 socket at 165W CPU with 24.75MB L3 cache, currently overclocked to 4.6 GHz (I have overclocked it to 5.0 GHz since it's so easy with this CPU, but I didn't like the extra heat generated, especially if my system is on 24/7) (Click to view on Newegg)
• (2) Intel Optane SSD 900P series 280GB PCIe NVMe 3D XPoint SSD in VROC (Virtual RAID On CPU) Raid 0 for my PC game installations (Click to view on Amazon)
• Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3080 Xtreme Waterforce WB 10G, 320-bit GDDR6X RAM with built-in waterblock (Click to view on Amazon)
• (2) Intel SSD Pro 7600P 512GB PCIe NVMe in VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) RAID 0 as my system drive with Windows 11 Enterprise edition (Click to view on Memory4Less)
• (2) Western Digital Red Pro NAS 10TB 7200 RPM SATA 6 GB/s 3.5" enterprise hard drives in a simple striping setup with parity using Microsoft Storage Spaces as my main data drive for media, torrents, etc. (Click to view on Amazon)
• (2) Intel SSD 600p 128GB PCIe NVMe drives used as a parity disk from the performance tiered storage setup from Microsoft's Storage Spaces (Click to view on Memory4Less
• ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 PCIe 3.0 x4 Expansion Card V2 with support for 4 NVMe M.2 SSD drives at x4 each and 128Gbps for Intel VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) (currently housing my (2) Intel SSD Pro 7600P and my (2) Intel SSD 600p drives) (Click to view on Newegg
• (2) G.SKILL TridentZ RGB series 64GB (8x8GB) DDR4 4000 SDRAM in XMP 2.0 mode featuring 18-19-19-39 timings at 1.35V (Click to view on Newegg)
• LG CX 48" Class 4K Smart OLED TV with AI ThinQ, support for VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), HDMI 2.1 inputs, 120 Hz at 4K resolution, NVIDIA G-Sync compatible, ALLM (Auto-Low Latency Mode), and support for WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio Association) speakers (I currently am using Klipsch's Reference Wireless Dolby surround sound setup) (
• Lian Li O11 Dynamic XL ROG certificated ATX full-tower case (Click to view on Newegg)
• Aquacomputer Cuplex Kryos NEXT VARIO with VISION CPU water block (Click to view on ModMyMods)

I built a server to run pfSense (a really cool, feature-packed, enterprise-grade firewall solution) with the following components:

• SUPERMICRO MBD-A1SAM-2550F-O server motherboard featuring the on-board Intel Atom processor C2550 with 4-cores at 14W, quad GbE LAN ports with dedicated IPMI LAN, and support for ECC RAM with a uATX form factor (Click to view on Newegg)
• Crucial 16GB kit (8GBx2) DDR3L 1600 MT/s PC3-12800 DR x8 ECC UDIMM RAM (Click to view on Amazon)
• SUPERMICRO SuperChassis CSE-512L-200B Black 1U rackmount server case with 200W power supply unit (Click to view on Newegg)
• SUPERMICRO SSD-DM032-SMCMVN1 32GB SATA DOM SSD drive (Click to view on Newegg)
• SUPERMICRO RSC-RR1U-E8 1U PCI-E x8 slot to PCI-E slot riser card (Click to view on Newegg)

Lastly, I use the following equipment for other areas of my network:

• Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rackserver with dual-socket Intel Xeon 5600 series 6-core processors, 18 DIMM slots with 128GB DDR3 RAM with ECC, 4 embedded Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet NIC's and dedicated iDRAC6 Enterprise remote management port, running Windows Server 2019 Datacenter's Hyper-V for all my virtual machines (Click to view on Dell)
• Cisco Catalyst 2960-24TC-L 24-port Gigabit managed switch (Click to view on Cisco)
• Cisco SG300-28PP 28-port Gigabit PoE+ managed switch (Click to view on Cisco)
• Ubiquiti UniFi managed PoE+ 16-port Gigabit managed switch with SFP at 150W (Click to view on B&H Photo Video)
• Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-HD-US access point with simultaneous dual-band 4x4 multi-user MIMO 802.11AC wave 2 technology (Click to view on Newegg)
• Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-M-PRO-US 802.11AC access point with simultaneous dual-band 3x3 multi-user MIMO technology (Click to view on Newegg)