It's alive.
All bar one part turned up, so a quick dash Saturday am to get a water cooler. (Sod's law, the part arrived Saturday tea after the machine was built).
Took about 3 hours to build. My lad did it and I supervised, and lent extra hands when needed. Main issues were making the cables tidy.
Windows went in like lightning. We sorted the drivers out then my son benchmarked it. At this point I noticed it was the 32 bit edition, which meant it couldn't access 12gb of the 16gb RAM. Doh.
Tried again, same issue. Googled a fair bit and realised if you download 8.1 via Microsoft on a 32 bit machine, it automatically gives you the 32 bit version without asking. Retried by downloading it on a Win 8 laptop (64 bit) and it was the right version.
Had a couple of hiccups with the web cam but that's sorted now the updates are applied.
My son was itching to try Watchdogs out but the program wasn't launching. Again, googled for a while and found it doesn't like some of the software that the motherboard has for overclocking. Disabled this and the game runs and looks beautiful in ULTRA settings. It absolutely wipes the floor with the gaming laptop we have.
The water cooler does its job well, the heat blowing out from the radiator is pretty hot. The case exhausts are nice and cool so the cooling is working well. It does sound like a force 10 gale though.
My lad is over the moon and has been hard saving birthday and Christmas money. The last bit has come from his grandads will. Something his grandad would have been happy with as he was a techy silver surfer.
