Swiftech has been developing powerful water cooling products for years, but it has now presented a solution for NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 400 family that flirt with regular air coolers. The MCW80 GPU water block has been paired with a gigantic aluminum heatsink.
Swiftech says that a fullcover water block can’t achieve optimal cooling of the GPU, simply because graphics memory, voltage regulators and other components contribute heat to the water loop and can’t keep up.
By using the MCW80 water block with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 GPU and then covering the remaining components with a gigantic heatsink it hopes to have a solution with the best of both worlds.
The performance advantage of the MCW80 GPU cooler over full-cover water-block solutions is well known among enthusiast users: improved thermal conductivity thanks to Swiftech’s Diamond Pin Matrix, and less heat dumped into the liquid cooling loop coming from memory, I/O and power mosfets since they remain air cooled.
Those who wants to optimize the cooling of other components on the card can equip the heatsink with a 80mm fan. The aluminum heatsink is available in two shapes and only compatible with NVIDIA’s reference designs for GTX 470 and GTX 480.
We can see the advantages of Swiftech’s solution, but we will need some more investigative comparisons before go nuts about it, not the least since the voltage regulators usually emit quite a lot of heat.
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