all right well this is meant to be an installation guide for installing the uh
GTX 480 full cover water block on the
GTX 480 and I guess it's a bit of a
guide for installing a full cover block in general should you want to do that
okay so the first thing is you will need to have all of the necessary things
you'll need a water block a video card please do this with a high-end video
card I've seen people like water cooling GTX 460s by the time you spend $100 on a
water block for that kind of card you might as well have bought a better one
um next you will need some thermal compound a Philips head screwdriver
usually although with the GTX 580 you'll need a Torx as well and then you will
also need the instructions please follow these carefully read them carefully all
of that good stuff so the first thing we're going to do is remove the stock
cooler I haven't quite decided if I'm going to do this video in real time or
like how real time I'm going to make it I think I'll have to sort of do the
steps and then come back cuz things like
removing screws from the back of a video card are pretty tedious and it's um hard
enough to just kind of Yammer on about random things to fill the empty parts of
my videos at the best of times but I mean this is just like graphics card
cooler installation there isn't really much to talk about so uh yeah bear with
me while I do this once you've removed all the screws from the back of the card
make sure you don't forget to do the ones at the end of the PCI bracket uh
before you try to remove the cooler okay so now that the card's apart
what I usually do at this step is uh take all of the thermal pads off of the
card put them back exactly where they were on the stock cooler take all of
these screws put them back into the stock cooler and then put it in a Ziploc
bag or wrap it in plastic wrap or something so that that's going to still
be there for you if you ever need to take off the water block and uh put the
stock cooler back on either for warranty purposes or if you don't want to water
cool that system anymore or whatever the case may be for this next step you'll
need something that I forgot to mention you'll need some 99% isopropyl alcohol
and you will need some uh teepee or I mean ideally you'd use a lintree cloth
but I mean who has enough of those to throw away oh and this is interesting
it's funny his timing is awesome because here's a pro tip for you I don't know if
you can see this or not but there's actually a hair on the GPU from when I
reapplied the thermal compound with the air cooler it's a multicolored hair so
I'm pretty sure I know where it came from
cat hey yeah you pretty sure it came
from you so uh the next step is you take a little bit of toilet
paper some ice propyl and you wet
it and then you remove all
residue all everything you can get off
of the thermal compound on the GPU as well as any leftovers of the thermal
pads on the memory chips so you use the
wet TP to remove it and then you should
give it another good wipe down with uh a
clean part you can see that even though it looked clean there was still quite a
bit of residue on there find another clean part go again you want to make
sure you're removing everything cuz that's going to give you the
best interface between the new water
block and the stuff that you are trying
to cool with it what I usually do after
I've done a good few wipes once the uh
toilet paper starts coming off pretty clean like that then I usually give it a
wipe with a lintree cloth which is normally whatever shirt I'm wearing cuz
I care a lot more about my graphics card than I do about my clothes and that way
you can be sure that you haven't left any little remnants of of toilet paper
fibers on uh the any of the surfaces uh
yet another thing that I didn't account for us needing scissors so now we're
going to cut the thermal pads to size so
that we can put them all on the correct parts of the PCB well not the PCB we're
going to put them on the RAM vrm uh not on the GPU thermal pads do not go on the
GPU and um yeah so I think the only ones we
actually have to cut are the RAM ones you can see ek's instructions are like
that so they show you cut uh four per so
the easiest way to cut four is to cut half and then to cut half again so we're
going to do that and
that and then we end up with little
thermal pads that are just the right size for a RAM chip so when you're
applying these please please please make
sure you remove the plastic covers from
both sides okay because if you leave
those on you will be probably roasting your RAM so good luck
with that so I'm going to go ahead and apply all the RAM ones and then we'll
cover the uh brm after that these are kind of finicky this is going to take me
a little
while it's a lot harder to do this when you're trying to hold a camera at the
same time so there it's
applied just like that
it's been a while since I've installed an EK full cover but it looks like they've actually uh really improved the
way they do their instructions so they clearly label sort of which pads are
which and which ones go where and what they're supposed to cover so that's uh
that's pretty outstanding so I'm going to do the mosfet ones now uh which are
this one this one and this one which
used to be square but I cut it down a little bit smaller because the it was
like coming up to here at the edge of the card and the last thing you wanted
to have it installed and be able to see the other side of the thermal pad just
under the block when you look in the side of your case uh I don't know about
you guys but uh you know I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to this sort
of stuff so that would be that would be an unacceptable result to me and I would
have to take the whole thing apart which is a real pain and I don't feel like
doing that so um as with anything water cooling it's
way way better to do it right the first time than to try to correct it later so
there I've put on that one next I'm going to apply this one and this one I
don't really care if they stick out the bottom because I'll never see those
actually I would see those I'm going to trim these too so just put well that was
almost really funny and uh haha I guess it's time to buy a new graphics card
sort of way I made a small mistake the uh number three thermal pad is actually
a little bit thicker than the number two thermal pad and I had misread the
instructions here I thought three was supposed to go over this Square here but actually you're supposed to cut it up
and put it on these little guys right here so that is now done and then I used
one of these strips that I figured I was being Innovative and trimmed from the
bottom of these to put up here so now everything is covered and I'm in good
shape as always with water cooling and this is why I didn't make the mistake
ultimately make sure you double check go
through do a sanity check make sure that all of your bases are covered all right
so next we're going to put the reinforcer and we should please note
that the orientation the reinforcer is important one of the other key points
when installing a GPU water block is making sure you use the right screws for
everything so you can see these ones are short the ones in the diagram for
putting on the spacer or rather the reinforcer plate are short I'm going to
use a technique that I call the Innovative edge of the table technique
so this allows me to screw something into the back of the card without
upsetting all of the thermal pads that I have placed on the top so I just kind of
get my head under it and screwed in from there now this next part's a real pain
and a total mess uh if you do it the way that EK
recommends um basically they say take some thermal compound put it on these
little washers and then put them in place and hopefully that'll help them
stay in place and then take the card and position it over top uh personally I
okay if I wasn't doing a guide for you guys and doing things by the book I
would never use the washers uh the reason they exist is because uh certain
people couldn't handle not overtightening their full cover water
blocks and uh here hold on I'm going to orient this this
way so that the uh PCI back plate is
going to hang over the edge of the table so I can put it down cleanly make sure
that I don't move those washers actually I better do this off camera this is
going to be tricky but anyway people couldn't handle not overtightening their
water blocks so um everyone started
implementing standoffs in one in one way or another and basically if you don't
overtighten it it's not necessary but since the manufacturer does recommend it
I am recommending that you go ahead and use them although I personally I'm not
going to cover them in thermal compound because that's a mess that I don't feel
like cleaning up if I ever have to remove it thermal compound application
is one of those hotly debated topics I'll be using IC Diamond thermal
compound okay and because this is such a
large heat spreader I will be using a large amount of compound and I'm going
to go ahead and use the X technique so
when you got a big surface to cover the grain of rice sometimes doesn't really cut it I
forgot how thick this stuff is it's hard to apply through a camera compared to
when you're not trying to apply through a camera there we go so then I'm going
to go where I was before and H take some out this way come
on okay I would recommend using well
part of the problem is the room's quite so cold you know what I'm just going to show you guys the end
result well that's quite possibly the worst job of applying thermal paste ever
but the most important thing is that we've got really good coverage in the
center and that it's got somewhere to spread out from so that uh the actual D
itself is going to be cooled so yeah do as I say not as I do that's terrible
maybe use the line technique if you're in a cold room with uh icy Diamond cuz
this stuff is thick when it's cold so I've carefully lowered it down exactly
where it goes um since I'm not using the thermal grease technique to hold them in
place uh a lot of them shift a little bit so all I have to do is take a
screwdriver and make sure that I realign the uh the washer before I try to put
the screw in which I've already done
okay so now what I've done is I've gone ahead and put in all of the screws into
the back of the graphics card now I've put them all in very very gently that is
to say that they they're not fingertight they're not any kind of tight I've put
them in far enough that the screw touches the PCB but there is no
tightening going on right now so um here
hold on I'm going to do the last one uh these two where there's the weird hole
for the fan in the PCB I'm supposed to use these plastic washers apparently so
I've gone ahead and done that so I'm just going to put that in there uh that
is because there isn't a proper uh screw hole for those ones so I actually
tighten that too much probably so yeah you can see these are quite loose
they're barely in there so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go
around and I'm going to tighten them all watch I'm using two fingers okay I'm not
going to overdo it I'm going to tighten them about that much that's all you need you need
contact you're not trying to
mash the PCB into the block this is not
like a CP U block where a ton of mounting pressure is going to make some
kind of difference in performance so you just
want to give them all a nice little turn there we
go oops I hope I didn't miss any there
and always double check so once we've double checked to ensure that we have
all of the screws installed in the back of the video card it is highly
recommended that you actually remove them all take the whole thing apart and
then check for contact between the GPU
and the block so that means uh if the if
the thermal pads are all still stuck to the block then you want to check all of
the RAM chips and all the mosfets to see if they have a little bit of greasiness
looking to them uh if they're a little bit greasy looking cuz that means they
were making contact and same for the GPU core you want to make sure that it's
nice and well spread out on the Block itself so that uh you can be sure that
everything is going to be cooled cuz remember you can check the temperatures of the GPU but you can't check the
temperatures of all this other stuff once you've got it installed in your system so you got to be sure that
they're going to be cooled last thing is fittings uh for
this you will need uh well fittings so
I'm going to be salvaging the older style of stop fittings cuz I really
don't like the uh the look of the new ones I find this much more aesthetically
appealing so I'll be grabbing these from an old EK full cover 8800 block that I
had lying around and I'm also going to grab a couple 38 compressions fittings
that are compatible with my water cooling system so um basically when
you're installing fittings you want to make sure a your O-rings are in the
proper position and B that they are
tight most fittings these days have a recessed o-ring which means you can't
overtighten them so feel free to crank
on them the technique I used to install these which is going to make them
impossible to remove by hand was I actually uh wrap the grip here in a
cloth and then I use a pair of visce grips to tighten them down so those are
not coming off unless I go get my Bice scripts
now so now I'm done the blocks uh
sexiness Factor has increased the cards
sexiness Factor by many times in my
opinion and uh the installation
procedure is complete as far as I'm concerned although some people would go
further and buy additional back plates
or buy uh replacement uh IO plates that
are only single slot so that they can actually install uh cards in the slot next to the
graphics card because this is now a single slot GTX 480 see all right so all
that's left now is to install it in my
system so I'll just take that apart and
it's going to go in there where the graphics card is right now thank you for
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