I have been looking at LED systems and looking at the idea of DIY LEDs and i am up in the air. I will have the tank ordered and made than mailed to my house. so i have the advantage to resize the tank if i need to so i can use the LEDs I want to use. witch are the Pandora LEDs , TrueLumen or Stunner LED systems. but if i DIY my LED system i will be using 30W 20k white and 30W 455nm with a controler and transformer for the system. but in a price battle it would only cost me 550 - 650 to DIY the system.
I run the ecoxotic panorama pro led modules over my tank. I love them, but my tank is 48x15x15ish. I have 6 12k/actinic modules over my tank and a 48" actinic stunner strip and still run 260w of PC lighting as fill in. It helps clear up the spotlight effect of leds.
I love these lights and they are keeping sps coral great, however, even with my fairly shallow tank, the sps corals are no more than 8" from the surface of the water.
I think I read that your tank is going to be 40" deep? That is pretty deep. The panorama are driven to I think 1.8w ea, so that really isn't a hole lot of penetrating power.
If you arent going to keep corals, or just softies and LPS high up in the tank, you might be fine with them, but yeah, as much as I think these lights are great for the $$$, they might be underpowered for your needs. Even if you end up stacking a bunch of modules together, they still won't penetrate very deep.
The stunner strips offer vitrually no growth potential, but do really help correct the color rendition of your tank.
My LFS runs the radions over their 800g display, but there might be other brands that could penetrate 40" of tank without all the bells and whistles that the radians offers.
Maybe check out the some of the LED pendant options like Orpek DIF 100w pendant. Maybe that would work?
If you check out my build thread, you can see what my tank looks like with this light combination.
FYI, this is going to be an awesome build.
Good Luck.
John