Swiftech unveils Apogee XT new flagship waterblock

[PiLsY]

Mine arrived yesterday. Didnt have chance for more than a glance last night. Looked awesome.

Had a close look this morning and im now of the opinion its distincltly less than awesome.

First off I had a peek through the inlet and outlet to see what the base looked like and immeadiately noticed metal strands sticking off the threads. They were a right pain in the ass to get rid of as I couldnt grip them hard enough with tweezers and couldnt get any pliers down the ports. Score down from a 10 to a 9 so far for annoying me and wasting 20 mins.

Next had a go at trial fitting my comp fittings and so forth. The outlet port is cross threaded just over half way down. Only noticeable on deep thread parts, but im using a male to male on the outlet. Thankfully have an EK spacer ring spare, as to fix that it would mean a complete disassembly of the block and re-threading the port with a hand tapper (or send it back and be delayed a week). Score now down to an 8.

Well at least the inlet should be easy eh? Wrong. Half my TFC fittings dont fit, they go in 1/2 a turn and stop. This happens on no other hardware I have, these TFC fittings go straight in to everything else I have from unbranded to bitspower. Thankfully after going through my 45 comps I found 2 out of 6 that will fit. Score now down to a 7.

No other mishaps surely? Wrong again. Boy am I glad I had a good look at the backplate because the damn thing is broken. One of the press fitted screw hole pillars has literally just fallen out. I say press fitted as theres no other sign of any other join - infact both surfaces were rusty. Score now down to what, a 4 maybe? I've checked the other three, one is fixed firmly and doesnt move at all, one is a little loose and moves in a couple of directions, the third is very loose and is easily and fully moveable up and down in the backplate.

The sad thing is this is all quality control. My XSPC Delta v3 had no such issues @ £26 and my Supreme LT was likewise perfect @ £28. This block cost me £57 (which is damn cheap compared to other retailers @ £65+, well done chilledpc) and I expect it to be perfect. The baseplate issue found by others wouldnt bother me as long as there were no loose bits of metal to go floating around. It'll have a microscopic impact on temps, well within margin of error for readings. This has really annoyed me though. I've not decided what to do yet - I may contact chilledpc and ask for the block to be swapped or take it direct to swiftech. I don't see why chilledpc should have to pay for cross shipping a new block when its manufacturing defects that have caused the swap. I'm also all set to do a big rebuild on Sunday which now looks like it wont happen. I think I'm going to go through all my backplates and see if I can jerry rig something to last me, and contact swiftech for a replacement backplate (and the missing s775 and s1156 backplates). May have a good moan about the QC on the block while i'm at it too.

I'll get a better pic of this later as the Mrs. digicam battery is flat, but this should suffice for now (useless 2mp nokia 6300):