Swiftech APOGEE XT CPU Water Block Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,330 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the apple G XT revision 2 from swifttech there's a very
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good reason I am unboxing this particular little piece of water cooling
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gear and that is because I will be using it for my ultimate liquid cooled machine
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build guide which will include a liquid cooling component so I'm going to go
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ahead and uh take everything out of the box and show you guys exactly what it
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comes with so the first thing we find is a couple of 1/2 in beautiful plated G14
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Barb fittings there you go so those are for/ in tubing all right next we have
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some thermal compound that is Arctic Silver sour Meek if it's still the same
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thing it was years ago which is exactly what it looks like very good quality
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thermal compound not the best but certainly far from the worst and
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non-conductive non-capacitive very safe for use in your system here we have a
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couple of black Worm Drive clamps so you put your tubing over the Barb you put
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the worm Drive clamp over the tubing then you tighten it up with a slote head
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screwdriver to make sure you got a nice tight seal in there can you see that
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okay yes you can all right next we have
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an install
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guide which is so easy with this
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particular block although it does show you a couple of interesting little
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things oh critical okay the water block side with the three screws must be paral
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par to the CPU locking lever fascinating that's probably just
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for maximum performance it might you know cost you a degree or two if you
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don't do it that way but uh fascinating
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okay so we'll bear that in mind right so
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let's have a look at the oh no no not just yet okay we've got an extra back
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plate so my assumption is that's an 1156 back plate and the one that is
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pre-installed here on the CPU block is
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actually a 1366 back plate so let's go
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head and yeah you peel that off for sure and I'll just take this apart a little
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bit before I try to show it to you wow
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water blocks have come a long way since I got my last water block upgrade which
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was actually uh quite a little while
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ago this one looks just
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gorgeous all right and so swifttech has
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really upgraded their mounting hardware System since the last time I uh
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installed a new block as well well this thing is like rugged okay so there's
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your two back plates as I guessed yes this is the 1366 the only difference is
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just the spacing of the holes and you can actually see that swifttech has
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designed this particular block to easily slide back and forth so you can install
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it on 775 1155 1156 and 1366 you can
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remove those Stoppers and then you can take these off but really there's no
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need to unless you are going to replace the hold down now as they mentioned the
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side with three here is going to be the side that you want to align with your uh
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with your CPU retention ARM okay so
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let's talk about the features of this particular block a little bit so this is
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the Apple GXT which is the successor to
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every other apple G block my my first water block was actually an Appo the
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original Appo and like its predecessors
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it uses a pin Matrix so you can see down into the block itself now it's a much
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tighter pin Matrix than it used to be the apple G had pins that were probably
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oh wow they must have been about six seven times the size of those the apple
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G GT improved on that and then here we
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are with the XT so you can see actually what's really cool about this block is
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that it does have a central Inlet which is a design that came in fashion about
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three 3 four years ago and that's not
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all you also have the option of taking the central Inlet and turning it around
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so that the one so your Inlet is here
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remember the inlet is the one where the water goes in so we go ahead and I'll
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put the barbs on here for demonstration so the water goes in directly over your
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CPU core and then re flows around inside
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the block cooling itself well not cooling itself heating itself cooling
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the CPU and then comes out the outlet but what you can do if you're not quite
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as worried about flow rate and honestly I've never been much of a flow rate guy
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I mean yes it makes a slight difference to the performance of a given water
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cooling system but it's not the end of the world what you can do is you can use
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an allen key to take out these six guys right here you can turn this around and
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then you can actually move the inlet over to this side which allows you to
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not only install these Barb fittings but you can also install compression
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fittings instead because you'll have that extra clearance so that's uh that's
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a really convenient feature all right so I want to show you guys the holdown
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mechanism swifttech has always taken holdowns very very seriously um they
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were one of the first ones well actually they were the only ones for the longest
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time to even have an Intel approved hold down in terms of the amount of mounting
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pressure sure that it was applying to the CPU and uh in terms of the
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convenience that it applies to users they have made great strides compared to
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their competition over the years so I'm just going to go ahead and show you how
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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
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uh finger test so you can see it's very shiny very shiny indeed okay and then
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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
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go peel off put back on wax on wax off
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all right and then what you do is you put this on the back of your board you
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take off those adhesive pads there Stick it to the back of your board in the
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right positioning and then you screw these in now what swifttech has done so
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well since very early days is
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implemented Stoppers so what Stoppers do
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is unlike their competitors like I said the mounting pressure being within Intel
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spec swifttech actually puts in place a
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maximum here so you can see we've screwed it in all the way it doesn't go
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in any further your spring controls the
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amount of tension that there is the amount of pressure there is on your CPU
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and that is how swifttech prevents you from overtightening and Bo your
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motherboard which used to be a big concern a few years back when not
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everyone was including back plates with their CPU blocks so really what it comes
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down to for me in choosing the Apple GXT is that I wanted something that was very
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very easy very robust to mount and I wanted something that offered top
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cooling performance so this little guy hits both of those marks no problem
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thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to my
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ncixcom channel as well as this channel so you can check out the ultimate build
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guide including a water cooling guide
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section