The 7990 big block showdown

Fwiw, I did have the EK block installed in my own PC (360/240 Monsta rads with an OC'd 2600K) for a couple of days and even at 1225/1625/1.3v, it only got to around 44°C on the cores. Not sure about the VRMs, but I doubt they went as high as the mining rig did at 1.2v/stock clocks.

It's only a quick benchmark, but this is a fair representation of temps at gaming load. Note how much more even the core temps are. Not sure why tbh as mining loads are even at 98-99% in comparison. Different test, different results eh?
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I also had the Aqua blocked card in another pc with a bodged together loop (DDC/bay res/AX360) mining away and I'm fairly sure that core temps were roughly even.
Perhaps these blocks run best when laid flat, rather than vertical as they are on the test bench?

It's also worth mentioning (again) that I'm using fairly crappy fans on each dedicated AX360 and that the corner of the room that the miner currently sits in doesn't get the best supply of cool air.
It will be moved into a cold spare room shortly, so those temps will drop significantly. Not that they're excessively high at the moment or anything.
 
An advantage people always forget with watercooling, is power consumption of these cards. You will find that they draw a fair bit less under water due to less resistance. This is way more apparent with cards that run high with their normal air coolers like 290x's.

I dont know what stock fans on the 7990s are like but it wouldnt surprise me if you saw a drop of 40-50w at the wall if they ran particularly hot on air. In terms of cash, that is very little saved but if you throw in a CPU and other warm things into the loop, where a fair bit of current passes through (like VRMs and such) it might make the difference when it comes down to power protection kicking in on the PSU.

When i tested my 290x on air overclocked with my 8350 @5.1, my OCZ 750w Fatal1ty PSU would give up under load. It was not pulling the full 750 but due to it not spreading the power among the rails equally, one of them was triggering the protection quite often. Probably every 15-20 minutes in benchmarks or games. Under water, my draw shown in GPU-z was much less and my PSU could handle it all. Wouldn't go by actual power values in GPU-z but you can estimate the percentage difference pretty well.

Have a Superflower 1000w on the way, as i dont trust this PSU now OCZ are bust and now the PC is mining most of the time i am not using it.
 
Fitted my EK block today, got a leaking compression fitting which sucks but reduced the loop to gpu to test.

While mining the cards reach a massive 42c! Very very impressed, so happy :D
 
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