EK-FC4870x2 - Waterooling my GFX :)

Well after getting sick of watching my idle GFX temps hover around 60 and the sheer volume of the fan on 100% I decided to do something about it and buy my GFX Card a pressie:



Opening the box the full cover block is rather nice



After removing the stock fan and heat sinks there was a lot of gunk and residue

So a quick wipe over with some nail varnish remover later:




The hardest part (so far) was the cutting of the heat pads - It doesn't help when the instructions have the wrong sizes and they dont give you an awful lot of extra incase you **** it up :S

Pads on:



So the first side of the cover slips on:



And then the other:



Those screws, even at only just "tight" bend the card like a disfigured banana - they just need to catch and take up the slack (one its been on and tested for a few days ill try tightening them up a tad more).

Once that was done, plumbed the bugger in and flicked the power switch ...................



PC booted, but the monitor instantly drops to "power saving mode" - undid everything, resteated everything, lossened the screws off and - same thing

Rinse repeat for at least 10 times - and now really nit impressed.

I tried a different lead, a different monitor, a VGA lead instead of a DVI-D - same problem and was now seriously thinking I had goosed my GFX card.

I could tell that the PC was booting into windows, but I just wasnt getting any signal.

After some furious googling I tried a CMOS / BIOS reset and thankfully that appears to have worked- all fired up now:






It has rasied my CPU temps by a few degrees (but still OK @ 3.6GHz) but the GPU temps have over halved (to mid 30s) and the card used to regularly hit 100 after a good session and now tops out at 60 so all in all im impressed.

As I say ill give it a day or two and see if slowly tightening the back screws helps with the temps before the card bends too much

Excellent read mate, am very interested as to how these hold up, however cant make myself part with 80-90 quid for a block though

with that size rad you should be getting some good temps

Tbh one 4870 was bad enough, the blocks were a very good buy.

Very nice. Would'nt do it myself though. Card and block almost £470.

I have a question though. Surely the ram on the back of the card don't benefit much from those two black heatsinks? They must get very warm?

The black heatsinks (at idle) are "warm" to "hot" can easily hold your finger on them Not tried under load :|

crud, my comp crashed earlier as I was posting. I'm not 100% sure what the cause was but several people on xtreme have been having problems with the EK block on the 4870x2, i think it was to do with tightening, the bending and the plastic they used being very susceptable to damage by being twisted. Its strong when you apply pressure to the top of it, but twist it and its liable to crack... or something along those lines.

A few people have had them crack I believe and cause some nasty system deaths.

Well worth reading especially before you try to tighten anything up.

I'm going to be watercooling mine with an EK block very soon, just waiting on the last few bits.

beautiful work! any overclocking benchies?

Thanks

Well both GPUs easily clock to 800 /100 in CCC - but i think that my CPU is bottlenecking me in 3DM06 (20,603 with the CPU @ 3.69) as it only increased about 200 odd points

The real noticeable difference is the HUGE drop in temps from 60/70 idle to low 30s (admittedly the loop has increased temp slightly and the CPU is up afew degrees - but im happy enough).

After a good session on COD4 (1920x1200 4xAA and maxxed out - limited to 250 FPS) it was running into the low 100s before - now it doesn't go over 60

And of course the noise - idle fan i could live with and on full whilst gaming i usually have a headset on, but by jezus it was loud - now the only noise from my PC is the pump and PSU fan

XSPC will be bringing out a block soon, with better/clearer instructions than the EK ones which were in broken english - didnt fill me with confidence.

Just trying to make my 4870X2 a bit quieter, if I can clock it a bit too then thats a bonus

*makes rjkoneill want to watercool his graphics card*

good stuff - the inside of your rig looks superb

danielanthony said:

XSPC will be bringing out a block soon, with better/clearer instructions than the EK ones which were in broken english - didnt fill me with confidence.

Just trying to make my 4870X2 a bit quieter, if I can clock it a bit too then thats a bonus

Click to expand...

I went with the 120mm fan attached via zipties rather than watercool, I didn't want to buy a full cover block that will be hard to sell on and expensive, or bother going watercooling with this card. With lowish fan speeds 33% or so it wasn't stable in games but gave 60-70c idle temps, with a fairly damn loud 45 or 50% it stayed at 75-80c temps underload.

Sticking the 120mm fan on, at a speed that I can't hear it over other fairly quiet case fans and I get 35-40c idle temps and 55-60C load temps. blower fans suck, normal fans seem more than ample for the card and costs, maybe £5 for a zalman 120mm and 20p for a few zipties. It would certainly be my recommendation as you won't get lumped with a watercooling block that few people want as few people want to spend so much on last generation tech and cooling when often they could get a cheaper, almost as fast or even possibly faster single gpu card thats cooled far more easily and uses less power.

Hopefully the long delay with the 4850x2 and the completely new style of heatsink aswell as the new direction all the 3rd party cooled 4870x2's are going now means we hopefully won't have to deal with incredibly loud and woefully performing blower fans for the next generation of cards. Could it be, stock cards that cool well, quietly and never spin up to an ear splittingly loud decible level? maybe.