Hardware BlastFlow Siberian Modular VGA Waterblock

omg this thing is so ugly o0

 

if it performs the best, but looks like dog turd, ppl will still buy it

 

That's a rather interesting design.

It's stupid that it will come with AS5 though...AS5 performs very well but is not suitable for long-term solutions. They should use either regular silicone/zinc oxide paste or the phase-changing pads or pastes that come on modern retail CPUs.

 

I like it as it is tbh, I like the nice clean but rough look. It may have sharp edges, but then HSFs aren't exactly finger-friendly and its not as if you will be handling it very often.

But as others have mentioned, what are the temps like on the VRMs and RAM? No doubt it does cool them, but it looks like the plate may get a bit hot?

I'm tempted as it means I won't have to buy a whole new full cover block everytime I upgrade my card, but what happens if it doesn't take off as planned? Am I going to be able to pick up a new plate for a new card a year down the line? If that is the case, the EK full-cover blocks for ~£60 are looking more appealing.

 

I'll take some temps when we get a proper block in, this is just a first look at a prototype.

 

what size hoses is this supposed to support ? the HS looks pretty chunky ..

 

we want arcitc cooling mx-2

 

Good good, awaiting the retail version review

 

Whatever you want, the barbs are separate - as in, you're free to add what you like. I don't have a ruler accurate enough to measure the thread size though and it's still installed in his system.

 

No point putting in a 1/2" barb if the cooler only allows 1/4" flow (something like that)

Like the OCZ Ram heatsink, takes a very small tube, and even if you put on a big barb, the cooler itself will restrict you
The GPU cooler looks quite big though, much larger then DD equivalents

 

I would like to see a flow diagram, i am very curious how the water flow thru the waterblock.

 

Few issues with the article - I'm not trying to knock but as I sometimes do thermal testing for a living I know just how hard it can be.

1) Did you repeatedly mount both cards to test for mounting errors? It would not be unusual to get a difference of several degrees between repeated mountings of the same waterblock. The only real way of doing this is to mount it say ten times, test it (simple ones like idle load) and calculate average and variance. This gives you an idea of how easy it is to mount well, and how close your current mount is to the average. This may already have been done, but there is no mention of it in the article.

2) How stable were the idle and load temperatures? Water cooled systems have a relatively high thermal mass, and this means it can take a very long time to reach thermal stability - far, far longer than for air cooled systems. Working on not dissimilar systems I would often have to leave the system for several hours to stabilise thermally before taking a reading. Realistically this is only possible if you are logging a full set of data over an extended period of time and can check that your dTs between GPU and air are now constant. The article only mentions that "We read the internal temperatures with the onboard sensors using Riva Tuner and took an average over several minutes of activity." - making it seem entirely possible that temperatures may not yet have stabilised when you took the reading.

3) Temperature measurement method - slight nit-pick here that the on-chip diode temperature doesn't necessarily have any relationship to how the cooling system performs on the chip, as in some cases blocks will cool the particular bit the diode is on better or worse than the rest of the chip. Checking max overclock is one of the better ways to get around this problem though.

 

we didnt do one, as we had other priorities first, but we have lined up an acrylic top cover that will be supplied separatelly, so you can watch whats going on inside.