Gadgetory

hey what's going on guys J's two cents here and it is almost June which means in most places it's starting to get pretty freakin hot which is kind of ironic considering right now in Southern California at the moment of making this video it is cold and it is windy and it is raining we are not used to this in California it's like a state of emergency around here the octane gaming gear combo from coolermaster features seven backlighting colors turbo mode a vago 3050 optical sensor along with four levels of dpi adjustment now you can po noobs without boning your wallet click the link in the description to learn more so with some are right over the horizon we're gonna be taking a look at the new GSP cooler for graphics cards from alpha cool yeah that does actually say alpha cool not not oh cool because that that's kind of like the Alpha symbol anyway the goal of this in fact when we first started talking about this last year and I did an article over on the webpage was the fact that they were reaching out to the audience asking people to if you want a free block send in your custom graphics card and they would make a block for it and sell it to the public and they would give you one for free so they really reached out to the consumers to find out which graphics cards were needing to be supported so they came up with a spreadsheet and then they pretty much tried to cover every single graphics card on the market when it came to you know the last couple of generations so if you guys were looking for things like you know gtx 760 4 gigabyte cooler it wasn't easy to find a full cover water blocks for those because it just wasn't worth it to companies like EK or bits power or swift tech 2 or coolants to make these blocks for these one-off lesser frequent cards so with all that said let's go ahead and kind of turn the camera and get in close with the block we'll do an unboxing and we'll talk a bit about the quality of it and really how this thing is designed and what makes it really kind of different it's not your your standard full cover water block well we'll show you why here in a minute so go ahead and cue that transition transition now this particular block we're looking at here is for the GTX 970 and this is for the g1 gaming from gigabyte now I do wish that their naming convention made a little more sense because this is actually the mo3 model but you wouldn't know what the heck mo 3 is unless you go and look at their little chart and trust me their chart is not exactly the easiest to read so calling it the GTX 970 g1 gaming full cover water block from alpha cool would have made a lot more sense but whatever you guys will have to there's mo 1 mo - MO 3 and before I'm about hey so you guys are going to have to just learn what those are anyway once you open it up pretty standard packaging here and then look at that a back plate a back plate that is actually included with the block that's not very common you've got all your pre-cut thermal pads this is kind of a big deal considering thermal pads typically you have to cut them yourself but check this out they actually take all the guesswork out of it by giving each thermal pad packaging here its own little color for reference in the manual we'll talk about that a little bit more in the future here you also get a little package of thermal grease or thermal compound and allen key two different size allen keys and all of your installation screws it's a nice soft foam to protect your investment and of course the block itself now the instructions here are a full page with all of the parts itemized out they actually tell you all the different thermal pads you get as well as the color of the thermal pad here on the manual corresponds with the different baggies that you have here and you have nice full-color illustration here in multiple languages showing you step-by-step how to install the block now we're not going to actually be installing this block on a card today because the 1970 g1 gaming I have is already being utilized in the Parvin build but that's okay that's not going to stop us from showing you how all the rest of this works out and all the other information here is all warranty type stuff and again you have multiple languages here it's in English it's in German and it is in what is that French food that's French so here is the back plate right here which is included with the block which that's nice to see because normally you would have to buy this separate and that's really annoying so you can see we've got the Alpha cool logo etched right into there and it is facing the right way so this is where your power connectors go and there are the cutouts for your SLI fingers and raised standoffs for all of the screws now when it comes to the water block we have the same grade of aluminum and we do have each block custom made specifically for the graphics card that it is being installed in so now we have to do the ceremonious removal of the plastic ah now as you can see we have cutouts here for all the different capacitors and things but we do have raised portions on here that are going to be touching very specific very strategic points on the graphics card so this is obviously going to be touching memory right here this is going to be touching more than likely VRMs back here and this is going to be touching some maybe some more VRMs there and if the 970 had Ram on the back I don't recall if it did I'd probably have raised portions on there as well but obviously the only part that is getting active cooling on this from the block is the GPU itself now this core right here this is very very similar to and I'm calling a core I don't know exactly what they call it this is very very similar to what they sell independently that you could use as a universal graphics card cooler where it will just mount onto the GPU and then you have to stick on little heat sinks on all the Rams and VRMs and things to keep it cool well what they've done is they've manufactured the part that everything mounts into for instance this part you know the GPU cooler mounts into this plate and the plate is manufactured to meet your graphics card specifications and layout so they have one part that goes into the middle that's universal and then what's different is the actual we'll just call it a cage it's pretty heavy-duty actually now this thing also acts as a giant heatsink so all of these fins here as you can see they're going to take the heat they're going to draw it away from the components and airflow is going to provide cooling to VRMs and the RAM as well so it would have been nice to see it be a full cover block but then it would have been much more expensive and it would have been much more difficult to manufacture this in a way that would give you more universal support so when you go ahead and you sandwich this together the way that it actually is meant to be installed it ends up looking pretty much just like that so as you can see it's a very aesthetically pleasing block now when I first was given information about this block and preliminary samples all of the logos were blue so I'm really happy to see that these are a nice just sort of a gray edged color maybe slightly white because it's going to look much better in many more builds but you have nice high-quality metal here very weighty the only blue that you can see right here is in the middle of the GPU block itself which also has a little bit of a flow indicator built in there you can't really see it moving but it does have a flow indicator in there which will turn as fluid is going through there so that's very nice to see it just feels like alpha cool has really thought out and done a lot of effort on this block the only downside to it is the amount of metal that is on here even though it's a lighter weight metal aluminum compared to you know copper it's pretty heavy so you're going to want to keep this in mind when you're installing this on your card and we want to make sure that GPU sag is not going to be something that you'll be dealing with now when it comes to this block some folks might feel that it's not worth it because of the fact that it doesn't have active cooling for the vr amps and the RAM itself but that really isn't the case or it's not going to be something that's that big of a deal unless you're doing high overclock sand by high overclocks I don't mean pushing the slider all the way to the right in afterburner or precision or whatever you're using I mean doing unlocked voltage hacked type overclocks then the vrm temperatures might be a little bit of a big deal but this is going to give you better cooling than any vrm cooling you're currently getting on your graphics card because most manufacturers are not actually providing vrm cooling in fact we've seen that some graphics card manufacturers are not providing n sort of real vrm cooling now we're going to go ahead and drop a screw will grab my r9 290x matrix Platinum here now I've used this card as an example before but the vrm cooler in this thing is just a tiny strip of billet aluminum that's got a little bit of heatsink built into it and that's it there is absolutely no RAM cooling on this thing the only thing getting any sort of active cooling is the GPU core itself and then some of the air that's going to push down through the fins as touching this little vrm heatsink but what I have found on this card specifically in this to be the case on a lot of different graphics cards not just this 290x matrix platinum is the fact that over time the vrm starts to get hotter and hotter and hotter and then you get artifacts and instability because of vrm temperatures exceeding safe limits even with stock overclocks now what I mean by stock overclocks is again anything that is officially supported in MSI Afterburner but because this card is officially an unlocked card you can push the thing past stability it's kind of the nature of the card so having a nice huge chunk of metal like this assisting in the 80 or aiding in the cooling aspect of the VRMs as well as the the vram beer I'm using it to hot that's not really that big of a deal this is going to be beneficial especially on a behemoth like this that really is known for pushing VRMs to the limit so there you go guys a lot of people are actually using this I know some people are going to be upset that I didn't install it and do a full test to see how low temperatures are like but I just wanted to kind of give you guys an overview of the block and tell you that it's definitely something worth considering it's not as expensive a lot a lot of the full cover nickel plated or copper water blocks which have additional cost for the back plates I love the fact that alpha cool has included this very high quality very well machined and very uniform and high-end anodizing on this thing the anodizing on this looks fantastic so it's definitely something to consider if you're looking to get into water cooling on a budget and it's going to be beneficial for your graphics card anyway so there you go guys tasty sense hope you guys have learned something with today's video if you're using one of these GPU blocks make sure you speak up down in the comments so that other people can learn from your experiences tell us what you think about it and as always guys follow on social media or any of that stuff the community forums or whatever Jase do sense comm if you guys just want to kind of chat and just have more discussion about today's video but besides that as always guys thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one hey what's going on Jays $0.02 here and we're back with another tech video just like I promised in the last bike video thing we just did and the J always pays his debts sorry I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones lately it's really getting addictive I just started watching it may God have mercy on my soul