Alphacool NexXxos NVXP-3 GPU Waterblock
Installation
Published: 14th August 2006 | Source: Specialtech | Price: |
Installation of the Alphacool NexXxoS was fairly easy. The instructions given are pretty detailed, although some parts are slightly unclear.
I started off with this:
A Club3D 7900GTX 512mb
The first step is to remove all of the screws off of the back of the card. This is pretty easy and you should end up like this:
Here you see the back of the excellent copper cooler/aluminium of the 7900GTX. Thermal pads are used on the stock cooler.
The next step is to clean the card off.
The next step is to clean the card off.
Then prep the card with Alphacool's included thermal pads. These are backed with sticky stuff to get them to attach to the RAM chips. In the test I used AS5 on the GPU core (so as to keep all of our water-block tests consistent). Alphacool did include something that looks like a silver based thermal paste for the GPU.
Alphacool include screws that come with springs. You have to use the included hex keys to screw these up. I had to make sure that these weren't too tight and this can bend the board.
Here is the block installed. As you can see, Alphacool include a backplate for the mounting.
As you can see this looks pretty damn good on the card. Note that Alphacool does not include anything to cool the PWM parts of the card so I have kept this installed from the stock card. Alphacool do provide a water-cooled PWM block, but this is extra and due to using larger tubing I could not use this.
The card looks pretty good once in place. One bad thing that I noticed was that the fact that the barbs stick up in the case means that you would not have room to close the door in a slim case. My Lian Li PC70b is such a case and I had to remove a case fan to get the loop to fit.
The card looks pretty good once in place. One bad thing that I noticed was that the fact that the barbs stick up in the case means that you would not have room to close the door in a slim case. My Lian Li PC70b is such a case and I had to remove a case fan to get the loop to fit.
This eventually produced the kink in the system that you can see above. Luckily, this happened after the testing was complete.
The block looks pretty nice installed but how does it fair in the testing?
Most Recent Comments
Great review mate, I sadly can think of many improvments they could make to the design.
Sound methodology and a balanced conclusion.
I'd take the EK over the alpha due to ability to change barb direction... That and it performs better lol
I'd take the EK over the alpha due to ability to change barb direction... That and it performs better lol
Thanks guys for the feedback, it's very much appreciated as it allows me to refine the process. Is there anything else that you would like to see done in future reviews that I haven't included?
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Let the games begin