ASUS ROG Strix LC II 280 ARGB all-in-one (Open Box)

After waiting three weeks for Amazon to finally ship this beautifully boxed beast, I finally got it and pulled open the fancy double-hinged box. Inside was a 100-piece puzzle with a pile of fans, wires, packets of screws and a nearly worthless instruction manual. Installation would have taken an hour, but the short screws for the radiator/case interface were too long and 1/2 of them dug into the fins… The other 1/2 were aimed directly at the coolant channel so I had to figure out how to cut them. After a fifteen minute Safari/ransack of my entire home looking for screw cutters I settled on my tiny hobby alligator-nosed pliers. With ten minutes of strained wrist, bent plier handles, muttered cuss words, and violently pinched palms I managed to cut enough screws to hold the rad in place. After another 1/2 hour working on cable management, I finally had something that almost looked good. It was together. And it looked pretty good. Fast forward a week of working fine and on boot the three fans go into heavy-lift copter mode and don’t settle until the CPU protection shutdown takes place…. After a couple retries, I pull the case open and realize a hose on the cpu pump gets hot only right up against the pump; And then the computer kicks off. The pump isn’t running. The wires are plugged in properly, but the pump will not move the fluid. It seems like maybe a piece of debris got in the water pump during assembly…Ten booger-flicking swats with my middle finger and the pump appears to fire back up and run for a couple hours… But the next day after 3 hours of PTSD inducing missions of HellDivers2 with my sons and a friend I go to shut down the computer, and the fans ramp up into airboat/heavy lift mode and the computer seizes up again!!! The pump actually quit while the computer was already running!!! I shut it down for the weekend (by switching off the power supply) to decompress from the aptly named game, and to ready myself for the battle that is certainly going to ensue to recover my money for this cooling system, and also wait another nearly month for the next one, hoping it works better than this one….