Waterblock on GPU wierdness

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14 Oct 2013
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Now this is strange - well at least to me it is :confused:

I have a Gigabyte GV-R929OC-4GD Windforce which works perfectly well when using it's original fan/heatpipe cooling.

If I swap out the fan/heatpipes for a waterblock (XSPC in this case) and put it back into the rig the Motherboard doesn't even see it and I can't get the motherboard to even post. (Power connections are in place etc.)

Could this because there is no load on the FAN power supply off the GPUs board; i.e. the card is self protecting/not booting because it senses that there is no fans?
Is this even feasible?
has anybody seen anything like this before?

it's frustrating becuase the windfoirce makes quite a racket!
 
i didnt think XSPC made a block that was compatible with the gigbyte windforce GPUs?

I looked for for my 290X and could only find an EK block (with help here). are you sure its not shorting something coz I dont think they are a reference design.
 
I wouldn't have thought so either, yet EK list their rev1 blocks as compatible even though it isn't a ref card:

kA0O0J8.png


All I can say is to double check the pads and make sure nothing is shorting...
 
I have to admit I took a bit of a gamble. EKs site had the cards listed down as accepting their standard blocks so I assumed that would count for XSPC blocks too. and yes I know what they say about "assume"..

it's very hard to tell if anything was shorting or not - as you probably know, when the blocks are on you can't see anything else!
I did check that the positions of everything and compared to the image supplied in the XSPC instructions there were very few differences.

I'd expect the card to be done for now if it had shorted - but it's working fine now that it's back on the Windforce heatsink/blower.
 
The only thing that was different was that there was an extra strip of heat pads.

using the image above, if you look on the underside of the removed heatsink there is a gap where you can see the heatpipes going into the fins (to the left of the main GPU plate), but before the next big strip of heat pad.
There was an extra pad in there on the Windforce cooler that wasn't in the XSPC instructions.
This is the part that sits over the line of square rectangular components on the card (what are these?) and the line of Capacitors(?) (I'm no electronics expert!)

I may try again with a pad in there this time to ensure that it isn't shorting.
Having reviewed images of the removed stock cooler I can see that these components sit in free air in a gap where the fan is. I guess there is a chance that they were being shorted by the block without a heat pad being in there.
 
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