welcome to my unboxing of the apple G XT revision 2 from swifttech there's a very
good reason I am unboxing this particular little piece of water cooling
gear and that is because I will be using it for my ultimate liquid cooled machine
build guide which will include a liquid cooling component so I'm going to go
ahead and uh take everything out of the box and show you guys exactly what it
comes with so the first thing we find is a couple of 1/2 in beautiful plated G14
Barb fittings there you go so those are for/ in tubing all right next we have
some thermal compound that is Arctic Silver sour Meek if it's still the same
thing it was years ago which is exactly what it looks like very good quality
thermal compound not the best but certainly far from the worst and
non-conductive non-capacitive very safe for use in your system here we have a
couple of black Worm Drive clamps so you put your tubing over the Barb you put
the worm Drive clamp over the tubing then you tighten it up with a slote head
screwdriver to make sure you got a nice tight seal in there can you see that
okay yes you can all right next we have
an install
guide which is so easy with this
particular block although it does show you a couple of interesting little
things oh critical okay the water block side with the three screws must be paral
par to the CPU locking lever fascinating that's probably just
for maximum performance it might you know cost you a degree or two if you
don't do it that way but uh fascinating
okay so we'll bear that in mind right so
let's have a look at the oh no no not just yet okay we've got an extra back
plate so my assumption is that's an 1156 back plate and the one that is
pre-installed here on the CPU block is
actually a 1366 back plate so let's go
head and yeah you peel that off for sure and I'll just take this apart a little
bit before I try to show it to you wow
water blocks have come a long way since I got my last water block upgrade which
was actually uh quite a little while
ago this one looks just
gorgeous all right and so swifttech has
really upgraded their mounting hardware System since the last time I uh
installed a new block as well well this thing is like rugged okay so there's
your two back plates as I guessed yes this is the 1366 the only difference is
just the spacing of the holes and you can actually see that swifttech has
designed this particular block to easily slide back and forth so you can install
it on 775 1155 1156 and 1366 you can
remove those Stoppers and then you can take these off but really there's no
need to unless you are going to replace the hold down now as they mentioned the
side with three here is going to be the side that you want to align with your uh
with your CPU retention ARM okay so
let's talk about the features of this particular block a little bit so this is
the Apple GXT which is the successor to
every other apple G block my my first water block was actually an Appo the
original Appo and like its predecessors
it uses a pin Matrix so you can see down into the block itself now it's a much
tighter pin Matrix than it used to be the apple G had pins that were probably
oh wow they must have been about six seven times the size of those the apple
G GT improved on that and then here we
are with the XT so you can see actually what's really cool about this block is
that it does have a central Inlet which is a design that came in fashion about
three 3 four years ago and that's not
all you also have the option of taking the central Inlet and turning it around
so that the one so your Inlet is here
remember the inlet is the one where the water goes in so we go ahead and I'll
put the barbs on here for demonstration so the water goes in directly over your
CPU core and then re flows around inside
the block cooling itself well not cooling itself heating itself cooling
the CPU and then comes out the outlet but what you can do if you're not quite
as worried about flow rate and honestly I've never been much of a flow rate guy
I mean yes it makes a slight difference to the performance of a given water
cooling system but it's not the end of the world what you can do is you can use
an allen key to take out these six guys right here you can turn this around and
then you can actually move the inlet over to this side which allows you to
not only install these Barb fittings but you can also install compression
fittings instead because you'll have that extra clearance so that's uh that's
a really convenient feature all right so I want to show you guys the holdown
mechanism swifttech has always taken holdowns very very seriously um they
were one of the first ones well actually they were the only ones for the longest
time to even have an Intel approved hold down in terms of the amount of mounting
pressure sure that it was applying to the CPU and uh in terms of the
convenience that it applies to users they have made great strides compared to
their competition over the years so I'm just going to go ahead and show you how
this works first thing you're going to do is you're going to peel off the plastic covering and let's just do the
uh finger test so you can see it's very shiny very shiny indeed okay and then
I'm just going to put that back on to protect the base because I'm not really ready to install it right now there we
go peel off put back on wax on wax off
all right and then what you do is you put this on the back of your board you
take off those adhesive pads there Stick it to the back of your board in the
right positioning and then you screw these in now what swifttech has done so
well since very early days is
implemented Stoppers so what Stoppers do
is unlike their competitors like I said the mounting pressure being within Intel
spec swifttech actually puts in place a
maximum here so you can see we've screwed it in all the way it doesn't go
in any further your spring controls the
amount of tension that there is the amount of pressure there is on your CPU
and that is how swifttech prevents you from overtightening and Bo your
motherboard which used to be a big concern a few years back when not
everyone was including back plates with their CPU blocks so really what it comes
down to for me in choosing the Apple GXT is that I wanted something that was very
very easy very robust to mount and I wanted something that offered top
cooling performance so this little guy hits both of those marks no problem
thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to my
ncixcom channel as well as this channel so you can check out the ultimate build
guide including a water cooling guide
section