Skinnee Labs - GTX480 Block Round-Up (working thread)

[gabe]

While the heatpipe will keep the VRM's stable, I recommend a fan over the mosfets.

that's exactly my concern as well, i am more worried about VRM temps than GPU, i don't particularly care whether the care is sitting at 40 or 45 as long as the VRMs aren't at 70+.

especially when overclocking, the VRMs and power circuitry is the weak link in the chain and not the GPU, so I'm hoping the koolance does a good enough job in that regard, my loop is also pretty bare so the added restriction from the koolance pin array wont be too much of an issue, anything to slow down my infernal pump (i swear i got sold a 3.25 instead of a 3.2).

i think that most experienced watercoolers can roughly guess the performance of the blocks just by looking at the block design, I think we pretty much all know the top three blocks will probably be the EK, Koolance and DD, swiftech's block will probably have lower GPU temps but much higher VRM temps, and the aquacomputer block is the only one I wont hazard a guess about since I have no idea what the the effect of the inlet/outlet design will be be.

From what other reviews I can find the koolance 470 block beats the BP and the EK 470 blocks. The koolance 480 block came out on top in a german round up, but as other posters have said the GPU temps will be mostly the same across the range apart from that joke of a BP block, its the VRM temps that interest me and skinnee is so far the ONLY person that has bothered to actually record the vrm temps, i think this roundup will be the only one that can definitively compared the overall block performance!! And that is why I am nervous.

I am hoping to get at least 850 on the core for 24/7 use.

There is one thing that everybody forgets to mention:

EVGA provides a factory warranty for the FTW cards. So there should be little if any concerns at all about VRM temps on this block.