welcome to another unboxing online as Tech tips this is the alpha cool NV XP
NVIDIA GTX 670 stainless steel polished
water block from alpha cool pretty much
this is what we're planning to use on our uh on our bit Phoenix liquid cooled
machine so we're going to use a GTX 670 and this Alpha cool Block in order to
achieve the cooling performance that we need in a small form factor liquid
cooled machine the thing about the 670 is it's such a low profile video card
that it is perfect for a lowprofile liquid cooling installation so you might
have noticed that compared to my standard HTC 8X phone size comparison
that I've never done before now or maybe once before now that this is not a huge
water block and the reason for that is the 670 appears to be a large graphics
card at first but when you turn it
around it actually has like an extension
that's only made of plastic I'll get slick to come in and have a look at this
first an extension that's only made of plastic that goes beyond the size of the
PCB here so this block is a perfectly
appropriate size for this particular card that makes sense to
you so why did we decide to go with this one well availability helps and Alpha
cool has been around a long time making water cooling gear so let's just go
ahead and see if I can figure out how like why do they do this look at this it
comes in like a food package see it's like uh it's like
vacuum sealed so just just slice that oh
okay yeah it's all good um I mean I think I can think of one reason it's
going to prevent the Copper from oxidizing if they have it sealed up like
this cuz one of the things that drives me crazy about Co blocks is oxidized
ugly stained copper so I'm going to be extremely careful not to oh that's going
to be hard um yep I have a
solution gloves um I love the look of
copper I hate the look of stained oxidized ugly copper so we're going to
go ahead and put on some gloves to handle this I would highly recommend
that you do the same thing it's not because of any sort of fault in fact the
more pure the copper being used by the manufacturer the better the chance that
it will be easily stained and look horrific after a little while so the top
is a polish stainless steel although it's available in a variety of finishes
so you can see how reflective that is we're going to see if we can catch slick
in the reflection diesel am I
close I got
him yes there we go that is how
reflective the top of this block is it's actually only a very very slim layer of
stainless steel covering the top of the block and it's two separate pieces of
copper here that make up the overall construction so you can also see they're
using Len key uh screws to hold the
whole thing together very very securely I mean these are pressure tested um so
yeah now this is a bit of a unique thing so they're actually using a little bit
less material to make up the block itself here it used to be that you'd see
um the threads themselves made out of whatever material the block is in this
case copper but what they've done is they've actually expanded the area here
by putting like a threaded piece through it so that's sort of a unique approach
it looks like it allows them to save on some of the cost of the block but it
shouldn't affect performance and it shouldn't affect the ability of the
block to uh to accept larger threaded uh
fittings so that was a that was a big problem for a while is some fittings
like the older dtec barbs had threads that were like this long and people were
putting them through full cover blocks and they were going almost all the way
through to where the other fitting would go on the other side and they were leaking CU they weren't going in all the
way so that's uh that's not going to be a problem with this one thing to be
careful of with these water blocks is you want to make sure that you have a
reference card so here they're giving you a little guidance thing for making
sure that your card is actually compatible with the block before you get
started so you can see right here all the places where you need to apply
thermal pads so here for memory and memory here for the GPU itself and here
for the vrm and um let's see what else
we got here ah yes their whole copper theme thing that I think is freaking
awesome so here's some more thermal compound that's going to be for the GPU core itself you won't use a thermal pad
for that and then copper Stoppers um I would probably go ahead and use nickel
plated Stoppers just because that'll be more consistent with the overall look
that I'm going for in my build but I think that pretty much covers it don't
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