Alphacool NexXxos NVXP GTX 670 Full Cover Water Block Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
958 words · ~4 min read
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welcome to another unboxing online as Tech tips this is the alpha cool NV XP
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NVIDIA GTX 670 stainless steel polished
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water block from alpha cool pretty much
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this is what we're planning to use on our uh on our bit Phoenix liquid cooled
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machine so we're going to use a GTX 670 and this Alpha cool Block in order to
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achieve the cooling performance that we need in a small form factor liquid
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cooled machine the thing about the 670 is it's such a low profile video card
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that it is perfect for a lowprofile liquid cooling installation so you might
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have noticed that compared to my standard HTC 8X phone size comparison
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that I've never done before now or maybe once before now that this is not a huge
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water block and the reason for that is the 670 appears to be a large graphics
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card at first but when you turn it
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around it actually has like an extension
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that's only made of plastic I'll get slick to come in and have a look at this
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first an extension that's only made of plastic that goes beyond the size of the
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PCB here so this block is a perfectly
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appropriate size for this particular card that makes sense to
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you so why did we decide to go with this one well availability helps and Alpha
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cool has been around a long time making water cooling gear so let's just go
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ahead and see if I can figure out how like why do they do this look at this it
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comes in like a food package see it's like uh it's like
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vacuum sealed so just just slice that oh
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okay yeah it's all good um I mean I think I can think of one reason it's
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going to prevent the Copper from oxidizing if they have it sealed up like
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this cuz one of the things that drives me crazy about Co blocks is oxidized
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ugly stained copper so I'm going to be extremely careful not to oh that's going
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to be hard um yep I have a
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solution gloves um I love the look of
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copper I hate the look of stained oxidized ugly copper so we're going to
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go ahead and put on some gloves to handle this I would highly recommend
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that you do the same thing it's not because of any sort of fault in fact the
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more pure the copper being used by the manufacturer the better the chance that
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it will be easily stained and look horrific after a little while so the top
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is a polish stainless steel although it's available in a variety of finishes
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so you can see how reflective that is we're going to see if we can catch slick
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in the reflection diesel am I
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close I got
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him yes there we go that is how
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reflective the top of this block is it's actually only a very very slim layer of
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stainless steel covering the top of the block and it's two separate pieces of
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copper here that make up the overall construction so you can also see they're
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using Len key uh screws to hold the
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whole thing together very very securely I mean these are pressure tested um so
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yeah now this is a bit of a unique thing so they're actually using a little bit
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less material to make up the block itself here it used to be that you'd see
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um the threads themselves made out of whatever material the block is in this
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case copper but what they've done is they've actually expanded the area here
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by putting like a threaded piece through it so that's sort of a unique approach
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it looks like it allows them to save on some of the cost of the block but it
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shouldn't affect performance and it shouldn't affect the ability of the
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block to uh to accept larger threaded uh
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fittings so that was a that was a big problem for a while is some fittings
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like the older dtec barbs had threads that were like this long and people were
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putting them through full cover blocks and they were going almost all the way
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through to where the other fitting would go on the other side and they were leaking CU they weren't going in all the
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way so that's uh that's not going to be a problem with this one thing to be
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careful of with these water blocks is you want to make sure that you have a
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reference card so here they're giving you a little guidance thing for making
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sure that your card is actually compatible with the block before you get
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started so you can see right here all the places where you need to apply
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thermal pads so here for memory and memory here for the GPU itself and here
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for the vrm and um let's see what else
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we got here ah yes their whole copper theme thing that I think is freaking
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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
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for that and then copper Stoppers um I would probably go ahead and use nickel
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plated Stoppers just because that'll be more consistent with the overall look
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that I'm going for in my build but I think that pretty much covers it don't
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