Need help watercooling my gpu

TheNoviceModder

TheNoviceModder

TheNoviceModder

Associate
Joined
11 Sep 2014
Posts
212
Location
Suffolk, England
So I'm still fairly new to the custom pc world, despite spending 1.4k on my most recent build. I'm planning a complete watercooled system which will be housed in an Enthoo Primo (gold edition) which is currently on preorder. As I already have a H100i for my cpu, the first thing to get the custom loop treatment will be the gpu. I've hit a snag though, which is I don't know whether my card is reference or nonreference. It's a Gigabyte Windforce GeForce GTX 770. I'm cooling this first as its the noisiest part of the system.

Any help is appreciated, thanks :)
 
The Windforce appears is a non reference card. Just having a quick look around & there doesn't appear to be a water block that's specific to the card you've got.
 
You can watercool any card, it just won't be with a full cover block. You need a universal block such as EK's excellent Thermosphere. You will then need some ram sinks to stick on the memory chips such as these although out of stock here. You can get them from many places for around £4. All will perform the same so you don't need to spend a fortune. One thing I would advise is to replace the thermal tape with Akasa's excellent tape. Again, out of stock here but widely available. It's excellent stuff and I have never had a heatsink fall off when using it. Just make sure that once you have removed the stock cooler to clean the chips with IPA to remove any residue that is left on them and the heatsinks should then stay stuck. Last of all you need to cool the vrm's as the heatsink for them is part of your stock cooler. You could use ramsinks on them (looks like maybe 1 ram sink per pair of chips or maybe even per 4 chips) but without direct airflow they will be overwhelmed so you need something better. I always make my own heatsink for the vrm's, usually out of a copper cpu heatsink but we need to find you something off the shelf. You could use Enzotech MOS-C1 heatsinks, you would need two packs of 10 to cover all your vrm's. OCUK used to sell a Alpenfohn VGA heatsink kit which would have had everything to cool the memory and vrm's but it doesn't appear to be available anywhere now. It's a shame as it was a very good price. Gelid does some enhancement/upgrade kits for it's Icy Vision coolers which should do the job.

Apart from ensuring that the vrm's are adequately cooled there is no drawback to going down the universal block route. Argueably the gpu core gets better cooling as the block design is a adapted version of the cpu block and uses a impingement flow rather than just passing water across some fins. I have used universal blocks on most of my cards and have never had any problems. The best bit is that when you come to change cards you can re-use everything on the new card unlike a full cover block that only fits a single card.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom