Hello 877cms,
So i have the same board as you and what eventually happened is that I went with hard tubing, i tried flex tubing first and it just would not play nice. At least as far as neatness was concerned. The specific reason that i really couldn't use soft tube was that the way i had to route it was so close to a fan i was super uncomfortable. I haven't swapped over my AIO cooler into the custome loop yet. But due to the really short distance from VRM to CPU, I was concerned that flex tubing would just cause issues and be bulky. What i ended up doing is just watching a bunch of Jayztwocents videos on youtube to get a feel for hard tubing and as it was my first attempt i feel like i did pretty good, and i just went directly into the VRM. however now that I have done that i wish i would have gotten some curved EKWB 45* fittings.... One thing ive been thinking about from other peoples builds is what they have done is just used fittings to go from outlet of VRM to inlet of CPU.
But at the end of the day, Im very glad I went to hard tubing. The only bad part was my start up costs were high, needing a heat gun and all that stuff that goes with it. But now i have it and i can continue to tinker.
i5 7600k 5.0Ghz--3200Mhz Corsair Dominator Platinum ROG Edition 16 GB-- Asus Maximus IX Formula--
Asus GTX 1080 TI ROG--Samsung 840 pro Boot-- Samsung 840 pro game-- Seagate 2TB--
Phantom 820 case-- Kraken x62 CPU cooler-- EKWB Res/pump/rad for Formula VRM cooler.