Hardware MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Sea Hawk X Review

I'm a big fan of putting AIOs on GPUs so fair play. Silly name, nice card.

 

I had a play with one of these the other week. I did notice it's also due to come out as a separate unit to fit reference 1070 and 1080 cards.

 

Not quite sure what the point is? The 1070 is not pumping out a lot of heat. There are plenty of cheaper simpler coolers that don't require water, pumps and other things that can go wrong, yet can cool it just as well so why bother?

 

Did you actually look at the thermals chart? No air cooler would get anywhere close to these numbers, and it's 20C cooler than the Asus Strix 1070. Anybody buying this card obviously wants the superior cooling which will (in theory) give better OC potential. Another reason people will like this is that unlike most high end air coolers, this will exhaust the heat directly outside the case, making it ideal for smaller-than-ATX builds.

 

It's not just the lower temps tbh. You then have a single 120mm fan that you can set to pretty much not audible. Then you simply set the fan on the GPU to the same (mine's doing around 35%, I found that more than enough to cool the fets) and you're done. No extra sound ever, no matter how the temps go up.

I know people don't see AIOs as proper water cooling but when you are taking a cooler designed for a CPU (much larger and hotter cores) and putting it on a GPU magic happens. They may look "ugly" depending on how you look at them but they're more important than CPU AIOs IMO.

Heat is the enemy when it comes to PC components. The more heat you have the more chance you have of melting/drying out flux and solder joints. So the lower you keep the temps the better on your components all round.

 

Good point - sound is a big consideration for many users, and I would consider myself very much an AIO convert after my experience with the NZXT Kraken. I currently have very good air cooling so I didn't see a need to keep it, but the performance of (good) AIO vs. sound is untouchable by air cooling.

 

All In ones are good for people who do not want the hassle of full water cooling loops. Noise depends on what you buy and if you use the stock fans or not.

Asus, EVGA, Palit do some brilliant Air coolers on Nvidia side these days, The only reason to need Watercooling on Nvidia is either build specific or your going crazy oc.

the 1070 and and 1080 by Asus and Palit are considered the cards to buy, Reviews show why. Lowest temps, Highest boost, Lowest noise.