Pretty much what the title says: I'm starting to put together a WC loop, but the biggest expense is the GPU blocks which cost an absolute bomb. Are full cover blocks 100% necessary? Has anyone used a GPU core block before and used passive cooling on the VRM/RAM? These Alphacool blocks are only £21.
From what I can tell it depends on the GPU and whether it is a standard layout board or not. And your right a full cover EK block for your GPU is like 80 Euros.
Full cover is definitely worth it, I see no point in cooling just the GPU itself and leaving the rest of the card baking hot. Also full cover blocks look a lot better than those GPU only solutions if aesthetics are important to you.
How much heat do the RAM and MOSFETs actually produce? I'd have a Air Pen fan blowing air across the GPU. BT OC'd this PNY card to 940Mhz with just a Core Waterblock attached on to a 120mm Rad.
When people say WC is expensive, this is precisely what they mean. Full cover blocks are no more "necessary" than water cooling itself is necessary - they are a luxury, hence the price. MOSFETs get extremely hot, much hotter than the GPU die; even though they have a higher temp threshold than the core, keeping them cool is integral to the stability of the card if you're going to overclock it. I'd agree with Blogins inasmuch as a full cover block will make the installation so much simpler - installing these small sinks is not fun.
Don't bother with anything that isn't a full cover block. If you're going to spend the money to dive into watercooling, then you may aswell do it properly. The cost of the whole setup totally negates the cost and principal of using a block for just the die.
The rest of that card got very hot, thought. I think the words "scorchingly hot" were said so I'd get the full waterblock.
Water cooling is a luxery and this is something I will jump in to over the coming months. I am currently using a 560 Ti and only have the option of the waterblock. The only solution is to upgrade the graphics card so I will be waiting a few more months so I can afford to watercool properly. As Dead Beat said, best to do it properly.
Nope. Yep. I posted two brief threads on the matter before: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=181271 http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=207107 Full-cover blocks generally look awesome, but I'd much rather have a block that I can reuse across different cards instead of adding ~33% to the cost of every new card I buy by also buying a full-cover block to match. The design of heatsinks in recent years has made this an even more feasible approach than before. Definitely. I tried it before and found it to be a nightmare. I prefer to use either a uni-sink if available or part of the stock heatsink assembly if I can.
I've used both. If you're using GPU only blocks then you can have problems with the vrms heating up a lot, I've had this problem with a HD4870 where even with a passive sink and fan it was hitting 90ºC+ under load yet another make of the same model stayed in the low 50ºCs. Possibly a poor design of the card. GPU only blocks don't look as good as full cover blocks but in my experience cool the GPU better but as GPUs can stand higher heatloads than a CPU it doesn't make that much difference in the end. If you're planning on Crossfire or SLI then GPU blocks can be a pain to add into the loop and it's difficult to make them look good. If you're only interested in performance though then looks don't matter. EK have recently introduced a Bridge for use with their GPU blocks making it easier to connect the tubing. You can virtually write off 80% of the cost of a full cover block as you'll never get anything like what it cost unless it happens to be a rare one someone's desperate for. After saying that I'll only use FC blocks in the future for both the full card cooling and looks.
This. It very much depends on the GPU too. Some graphics cards have nice cool-running VRMs, RAM and MOSFETs, and so are ideal candidates for core-only blocks. I had an EK VGA Supreme on a GTX480, and was able to overclock it to nearly 1GHz on the core, plus the CPU (an i7 920 at 4GHz) on a dual radiator with excellent temperatures, which is unlikely to have been the case with a full-cover due to the added flow restriction and heat from the VRMs etc. Those parts remained cool enough (about as warm as stock) using the stock backplate and a decent fan blowing over the card. Full cover are probably a better bet for multi-card setups however, as getting the airflow to several cards could prove troublesome.