Quote Originally Posted by SuperchargedZ06 View Post
Well, there's all the hassle of dealing with a dead card - getting the RMA, removal, packing it up, waiting for a replacement, and then re-installing it. Not as trivial as an air cooled card. Have to bleed the system, worry about spilling fluid, messing with fittings... And the system down time to contend with. Kind of hard to run a loop that has a component missing without some re-config. Add the hassle of waiting a week or two before you can get things running again.

Not knocking EVGA or their warranty service - they are among the best. But I'd rather not have to deal with a card that died in the first place due to it being pushed a bit. If one plans on keeping things stock, I think the EVGA FTW block is great... but for those of us that want to push the cards a bit harder on water... as "Xtreme" folk tend to do, I don't think the block's design is as optimal as some of the other options that are out there.

Just my 2 cents...
Try to reflect in objective engineering and economic terms: The manufacturer knows what their product is going to be subjected to. As a result, the choice of a cooling solution is based on a set of specifications that includes cooling performance, form factor, cost as well as product liability. If the product cannot perform reliably or has a limited shelf life with the tools that are provided to the enthusiast consumer to overclock the card, then the product may become a serious liability.

You are correctly mentionning the hassle of having to deal with a dead card from your standpoint, but now put yourself in the position of a manufacturer who would have to deal with hundreds of failed cards.. it just would not make sense to expose itself to this kind of hassle for any manufacturer.

Not to say that it couldn't happen, after all mistakes are part of the fabric of our Society, but there should be a reasonable assumption that things are done the way they are because they work within the intended specification enveloppe.

In practical terms, our solution drops the VRM's temps under extreme conditions by ~ 30C's compared to stock with no noise penalty. This in itself extends the component life well beyond the original specs. There are other factors that may influence the product shelf life under extreme conditions, but excessive temperature of these components is not going to be one of them.

Quote Originally Posted by Coldon View Post
You do bring up a very important point, that out of all the solutions, it is the only one that doesn't void the warranty and so for beginners it should be the preferred choice.

VRMs in general have a pretty high temp tolerance and maybe its not such a critical issue as many make it out to be. I've pretty much air cooled my vram and vrms on all my water cooled GPUs and never once had a dead card.
Thank you for thinking this thru, it is appreciated. I would only comment on your qualification of the potential users as being "beginners". I think on the contrary that people "in the know" (engineers for example, and certainly enthusiast users by extension) would appreciate the value of the argument I am presenting above.

For the record, I am in favor of rating products based on a set of objective as well as subjective features, but I think that it is important to put things in prospective with respect to the relative importance of the objective criteria. As it stands, my bona fide opinion as an engineer is that the VRM temp criterium should be placed in its proper context as opposed to being exploited for what I perceive to be marketing purposes of one kind or another.