What Water Blocks fit HIS 5870 iCooler Turbo?

[Nippletweaker]

Hello,

I have a pair of HIS 5870HD IColler Turbos running in XFire which are getting very very hot (92C at worst) under stress. I know its an airflow issue and that its common with XFire configs. Its exaserbated by the lowest PCIe slot having my Revodrive in it so neither card is drawing enough air even with a side fan blowing at them. When gaming it sounds like a helicopter is about to take off.

I am seriously considering watercooling. I have an H50 on my CPU but am pretty much a noob when it comes to watercooling so my questions are:

-What blocks fit my graphics cards? I tried HIS technical support but they had no idea. I have seen an article on the web suggesting just cooling the GPU and not the memory etc... is this not asking for trouble?
-Will I be able to add the CPU to the loop or will this require second loop?
-My Case is not at all optimised for watercooling (Antec p180) I planned to use an external radiator/reservoir combo are these any good or should I upgrade my case and go all internal?

Andrew

 

[ahenners]

Have a look on the EK website. They have a compatibility list for their waterblocks so see if your card is on there. If its a reference design then it should fit, but then I think EK have produced a V2 waterblock for non-reference design 5870's. Other than that companies such as XSPC, Danger Den, Aqua Grafix, Koolance will probably have blocks for it too.

Without knowing your cpu at whether its overclocked or not it would be hard to say whether you could run the gpu's and cpu on same loop. Depends on which radiator you would get too.

You could mount the radiator externally, many people do, not sure about having the reservoir outside though from a practical point of view. I have my 360mm radiator mounted via a radbox to the back of my case and a dual bay reservoir that drops into 2x 5.25" drive bays

 

[Squakingcow]

If the worst comes to the worst and there aren't any full cover blocks available for your 5870 (which is quite probable if the PCB is a non-reference design), then you could use a core only block like the swiftech MCW60 and then use a combination of a slow spinning 120/140mm fan pointed at the cards with heat sinks applied to any areas that need them (vrms etc).

With regards to the res/radiator issue, swiftech also do some good radiators which have a res built in. IIRC they also recently released a complete res/rad/pump combo which could prove very useful since it would drastically reduce the effort required to build the water cooling system.