Gadgetory

what is up guys Jase two cents here and it is a beautiful sunny Saturday morning here in Southern California so I figured why not take this opportunity to go ahead and bring you guys a head-to-head no-holds-barred comparison between two different water cooling products here to see which one is can you get 10% off anything from Coolermaster at the CM store see the description for details now as you guys know I recently put the EKF sea water block on my massively overclocked GTX 780 now alpha cool who happens to be one of my sponsors through the aqua tuning sponsorship said hey why don't you go ahead and take our water block technology that you did a video on a few months back and go ahead and do a comparison video with the EK FC to see if what they claim is accurate remember guys on that video I showed you that they do spot cooling here with a lot of little blocks rather than doing a solid piece of metal in order to cut down costs now avec ole claims of jail actually sacrificed any cooling capacity by doing it this way so that's what we're gonna find out today we're gonna put these two blocks head-to-head and find out just which one is king now a couple of things I want to let you know here first we are gonna be doing this in my gaming rig right here which is my 3770k overclocked as well as my GTX 780 which is BIOS hacked voltage hacked and overclocked I'm gonna be doing this test in two ways I'm gonna be doing a stock speed on this gtx 780 and then we are gonna do max overclock at 1.3 volts on the graphics card to pump as much heat as we can into these blocks and see whether or not it brings either of these two blocks to their knees so just to recap stock speed comparison overclock speed comparison and then we're gonna go ahead and take a look at the temperatures and see just which one is king now while I'm in there I'm gonna go ahead and get rid about white tubing as well it's kind of dated it's getting stained on the inside and I'm gonna go ahead and put some black tubing in there so that we can just go ahead and make the system look a little bit better I figured since I have to tear the system apart twice to do this video I might as well go ahead and do it while I'm in there so without further ado let's go ahead and start get in our numbers start tearing this thing apart and we'll come back and find out exactly which one is king now let's be honest when it comes to water cooling your computer the looks of the water block are very important to most of us and I think the EK water block is the clear winner when it comes to aesthetics now the black alpha cool water block isn't so bad but the clear one is just atrocious and I made that very clear in my review it does have a pretty decent looking backplate unfortunately it wasn't compatible with my 784 cooling we're going with a quad and a triple radiator from alpha cool so I want to make that clear so you know what kind of radiator space that we have now as mentioned I did run into a compatibility issue with the backplate and my 780 so for the purpose of this test it's not being used however it's just an aesthetic thing and it doesn't really affect performance whatsoever also keep in mind that the back plates are not going to be included in the price review when we look at the comparison of price at the end of this video now when it came to doing testing I decided to go ahead and just load up battlefield 4 instead of doing looping synthetic benchmark testing because this is a more real world experience now first up we have the Alpha cool MV XP 780 and idle temperatures on this we're pretty good they idled at 26 degrees Celsius and that is nearly ambient temperature if you take a look at the graph now when it comes to low temperatures it loaded out at 35 degrees Celsius with all stock settings remember we're testing this first with stock settings and then we'll go ahead and bump it all up into my max overclock to compare now these temperatures are pretty damn good considering what the block is made out of so how did it compare to the EK full copper water block i mean the entire water block is metal so idle temperatures on the EK FC were 24 degrees Celsius that's too less than the alpha cool and low temperatures here at stock speeds for the 780 kept out at 33 degrees Celsius so you can see here we were pretty much a 2 degree Celsius Delta between both idle and low temps on the stock speeds 782 degrees Celsius between these two blocks was actually kind of surprising I mean I know that alpha cool is advertised that they were pretty much comparable when it came to cooling capacity but I was I'm a firm believer that a solid piece of metal is better and wood better overall so two degrees Celsius difference between both of these blocks really did surprise me now how does it do when we pump 1.3 to 5 volts at it with my max hacked volt 780 now once again the idle temperatures was 26 degrees Celsius on the Alpha cool MV XP and that's pretty much because the clock at idle turns all the over clocks off so I expected the temperatures to pretty much be the same but when it came to 1.3 5 volts at 1385 megahertz we were capping out at 44 degrees Celsius now that's pretty amazing for one reason in particular before we even compare that to the EK water block is that as roughly half the temperature of what the air cooled 780 was doing with the blower style cooler so already no matter what you're comparing it to the low temperatures overclocked compared to the stock air cooling already proves it's worth regardless of what you're comparing it to alright but enough of the blah blah blah how did it compare to the full Copper full cover EK water block well EK idled at 24 degrees celsius and we already explained why it's idling at the same template was prior to overclock but the low temperatures on the EK were 40 degrees celsius now that's a 4 degrees celsius Delta between the NV XP block and the FC block now I think that could be pretty much because of the fact that it just when all of the metal is touching each other it gives a wider surface area to just distribute that heat over giving you better overall cooling and and as the coolant is flowing through the block it's touching most of that metal allowing for better heat transfer now let's go ahead and talk about the 4 degrees Celsius Delta is that gonna make any difference in the overclock in your block absolutely not it's 44 degrees Celsius really good compared to 40 both temperatures are great 4 degrees Celsius cooler is awesome but you're not going to have any additional length of life you're not gonna have any additional overclocking capability with only a 4 degrees difference in the Delta now let's go ahead and talk about the next aspect of this test which is just as important as the temperatures and that is going to be the cost because you see the NV XP water block costs 84 dollars on average here in the United States now the EKF city water block the nickel version that I'm using it is about 118 dollars average here in the United States so you're talking 1/3 extra cost over the NV XP now which should she choose and why well personally I'm still gonna run the e KFC water block has nothing to do with the fact that it was sent to me for review I've been buying ek blocks as long as I've been water cooling my graphics card but if you're the kind of guy that cares more about aesthetics and the way it looks the ek water block is gonna probably be the right pick for you and you'd be the kind of person who'd be willing to spend 40 extra bucks to have something that just looks as damn awesome as the ek does but if you're more of a functional reformed kind of guy and you don't really care how something looks as long as the performance is there then you're probably gonna be more interested in the Alpha cool NV XP block because it'll save you 40 bucks that you can put somewhere else in your system you'll have temperatures that are still far better than any air cooling solution when it comes to your graphics card and you're gonna be happy in the end and you know maybe you're being a little bit more friendly with the environment considering no I won't even go there but anyway when it comes to these water blocks what do you think we're talking 84 bucks versus 118 and only 4 degrees difference at overclocked settings and 2 degrees difference at stock settings so sound off down in the comments which block do you like and why I appreciate you guys watching this video as always follow me on Twitter to give me input on the things that is that you guys want to see and as always I will see you guys in my next video