Gadgetory

what is going on everybody Jase $0.02 here and I've started putting together the parts for my white and green build which I you know I'm terrible at come up with names for these things I'm thinking something like a project peppermint or something like that I don't know that's kind of cheesy but whatever the case may be I'll be taking the opportunity when I build this system here to do a few like how-to videos especially when it comes to water cooling because I mentioned in the last video that we just don't have enough water cooling stuff this summer so one of the things that we're going to be doing obviously is water cooling the graphics card that's going inside this unit so even though I have done a one or two of these in the past I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do another how-to video on how to install your ek water blocks graphics card water block now it does pretty much apply to most graphics card blocks on the market some of the you know instructions are going to vary a little bit based on the block but anyway you get a general idea of how easy it is to actually do this so you guys will feel a little less scared and daunting it at doing this because really it's not hard at all in fact you I'm going to do this video you guys are gonna realize how easy it is and you're going to be like we need to watch J this stuff is easy enough don't do that 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 ok so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead I'm gonna take the camera angle I'm going to push it down into kind of the workspace here and show you guys how I install these water blocks of tools that I use and like I said just show you guys it's not hard it's not hard at all it's really easy I think people get a little bit scared at the idea of taking their coolers off their graphics cards because they think these things are extremely fragile and they're gonna they're gonna break it if they breathe on it the wrong way and that's just not the case so let's just go ahead and stop talking and let's go ahead and do it now no making fun of my cycling tan line it hurts my feelings and it makes me sad no in all seriousness I don't care anyway there are three general tools that I pretty much use when I do these jobs I've shown this before a million times I've had this stupid little husky 6 in-1 or whatever they're called screwdriver for quite a while it's got a big Phillips and a big flat head on either side plus a 6 mil in an 8 mil driver bit you're gonna need some scissors and you're getting the anti-static workspace now I've been using this thing now for a couple of years this is a CM Storm Power rx mousepad but it's a rubbered surface and so it's a perfect anti-static surface because it's not going to generate static as opposed to working on carpet or maybe a cloth match or something I like to use this guy that's why it's all beat up I've been using this as my workspace for quite a while now we are using the e KFC Titan X block which works on Titan X as well as 980ti this is the nickel plexi version now this is not the full-length water block like you would see right here on my 980 this is one of the nine 80s that came out of skunk works and you can see the full-length water block comes all the way to the end of the card but this guy right here is only going to come to about right here it's not going to do the entire length of the card which is going to make the card a little bit lighter overall plus it's in the nickel plexi so it's going to be see-through you'll be able to see the coolant and it's going to look really really nice now optionally the back plates do not come with the blocks so of course I do have a back plate and this is the nickel-plated back plate I think it's going to look real nice especially in this system being so reflective and of course you need your graphics card now before you start taking this thing apart or doing anything on this just go ahead and set it aside and open up your water block packaging and get familiar with the instructions I know we guys like to be like we don't need instructions we can just look at it and figure it all out on our own well you know that can be a costly mistake if you don't pay attention to what you're doing so I suggest you eat a little bit of your pride and you read the instructions inside the box to find a packaging of hardware a number of who checked it as well as some thermal compound now this thermal compound is important because it is non conductive so you're going to want to use the compound that comes with the card I've been using it all along I've never had any issues whatsoever you're going to have some pre-cut and some non pre-cut thermal pads on here this is going to be for all your RAM chips and then you've got your instructions and of course you've got a beautiful piece of hardware itself the waterblock now that we're ready to start taking apart the graphics card I take note of where all the screws are you don't want to miss any of these screws and try and take the thing apart because you could damage the board that way you could over bend it could crack it could break a lead something so you're always going to have four main screws right here surrounding the GPU with Springs on them these are the four main screws that are actually holding the cooler to the GPU die I tend to personally start with those but again you're just going to want to make sure you get all of the screws out now in nvidia graphics cards there's also two screws right here in the right here in the front of the graphics card that are holding the cooler don't forget these two guys right here i've seen how many times people forget these and they start trying to yank their cooler out and they cause damage because they get didn't get these two main screws now don't confuse those two with the three smaller ones on here the three smaller ones on this card are actually holding the display ports and the HDMI to the card itself so you don't want to undo those it's kind of nice and NVIDIA started using Phillips screws on these there was a while there where they used hex head I don't know if that was just to try and deter people without hex head screwdrivers from being able to take apart their cards but I think now that water cooling has become so much more mainstream a lot of companies are actually including Nvidia are starting to become much more friendly with allowing people to water cool their cards without even voiding warranty so that's always nice you alright once you've double-checked that you've gotten all your screws out - from the front as well as everything on the back of the PCB this is a part right here you want to be gentle because you do have cured thermal compound on on the actual heatsink itself which is going to become like a glue once it's you know completely cured as well as all of the thermal pads on each one of the GPU vram chips as well as the VRMs back here so those all are sticky and it's going to make it feel like the card isn't coming apart if it's not coming apart and you try and try and try you twisted and you've rotated and you can't get it to come off then you want to make sure that you didn't miss any screws but if you're confident that you didn't miss any screws then all you got to do here is I tend to start from the back and just kind of do a little wiggle yes there's going to be a little flex in the card don't want to freak you out and then it will come apart now don't just yank the card apart because as you can see you've got two plugs in the back you've got one for the LED and one for the fan so you're going to want to be very gentle when you unplug these that way you can use them again if you need to in the future if you want to put this thing back to stock so you want to make sure that you don't break any of those wires so here is the naked graphics card it's actually not too big huh people seem to think graphics cards are so much bigger than they are because the size of the cooler adds but for now go ahead and set that aside and we don't want to lose any of these screws so we're just going to go ahead and put all of these screws back where they go in the in the actual cooler stock cooler that way if you ever need to put this thing back to stock even if you have these things sitting in a ziplock bag or something you could still lose that bag but if you screw them all back into their respective slots you'll know where they go and you'll know where they are as long as you don't lose your cooler if you lose your cooler well then you're kind of you're kind of ass out of luck I guess you would go into some forums trying to find somebody someone I used one time I guess I forgot to mention you're going to probably need some rubbing alcohol as well as a microfiber cloth or a coffee filter or something that's non fibrous even though microfiber says fibers I I use it because we need to clean off all this old thermal paste right here so just take some isopropyl alcohol anything 70% or higher and just get off all of that old rubbing comp or that old thermal paste on there now it's not important that you get down in all these prax and all of the different traces that are around the GPU I just like to do it because when you put on the new block inevitably it's going to get down in those crevices so it just keeps there from being too much build up on there but that's it we've now got a nice clean GM 200 chip here ready to receive a nice water block now what you can do - and I do highly recommend is just take a little bit of alcohol to the top of each one of the RAM chips because it did have that heat pad on there or that thermal pad on there which has a little bit of grease on it which will make the new thermal pads a little bit hard to stick on they won't actually stick to the chips if they've got any of that residue that's left on there because it makes them slick so once everything is nice and clean pretty much what we're going to do now is go ahead and get the block ready to install now this next part here you're going to need the instructions because we have to know where to put all the thermal pads now all the pre-cut pads are going to go on the RAM chips that are surrounding the GPU and the ones that are not pre-cut you'll have to cut to length to put on the VRMs now pay attention to the instructions they tell you which pads go where and it is different per cards you're going to have to look at your instructions and not just look at this video so we're going to go ahead and do that now now an easy trick that you can do to figure out what you need to cut and where is the thermal pad material is actually pretty soft so if you take it and you put it on top of the chokes or anything that you need to actually cut and get an outline on you can kind of get an imprint on there of where you would need to cut so now you guys can see you can do I can just cut a strip based on where these are actually indented right there and if the camera actually picks that up but now I know exactly what size I need to cut it alright so this is the most controversial part of the video every single time I make it and that is the application of the thermal interface material now you want to be careful when you're using their little applicator thingy because it tends to just kind of like shoot out huh anyway so you're going to want to be a little bit careful maybe start it somewhere on a piece of paper and then once it's flowing you can its unstuck I should say this little syringe kind of get stuck now they recommend an X as well as a plus type of a pattern on their GPU now I'm going to trust ek over all of the armchair quarterbacks on the internet because they're the ones who made it so they're the guys who I trust if you don't want to do it their way then do it your way it's all there is to it I know why this has to be such a big o debate and I know this looks like an awful lot of compound it kind of is but you really do want it to fill the entire die because unlike a CPU which has a heat spreader that shiny part is the GPU so you want every bit of that covered and it is going to run over the sides and into that channel around the GPU and that's fine because it's non conductive but you do want every bit of that shiny part covered once it compresses and actually spreads out now for this next part I like to take the box and set it underneath the GPU like this because now when you take the block and you actually apply it you'll find you'll see that the actual I Oh or the the display mechanism here whatever you call that it taller than the graphics card so when you flip it upside down this would just plop off but if you take the box you can hang that part off the edge of the box and you can keep the card nice and flat so that as you are installing all of your screws then you're not going to have any issues with the block wanting to fall off so now go ahead and dump out your little baggy of bits here don't lose any of them though that would make for a bad day and follow the instructions when it comes to putting everything together now I am going to start with the four main screws that surround the GPU just like we took them off we're going to put everything back together pretty much in a reverse order and make sure you use these little rubber are these little plastic standoffs there as well because those are going to be giving you protection for your boards you don't actually break or crunch anything now also make sure you don't over tighten this remember the block is made out of copper which is a soft metal and the standoffs are made of steel so you can't easily strip those out these don't need to be super tight this isn't a car you don't have to torque them down to inch pounds or anything like that just get them snug now the cool thing about the ek back plate if you look at the instructions is even though this is not a Titan X so I don't need to put on any of the standoffs or the chips it does actually provide some cooling to the back of the GPU socket as you can see right here we are going to be putting in a thermal pad right behind the GPU die as well as the backside of the vrm so we are going to be transferring some heat to this plate so that we have a bigger surface area to carry away some of that heat so this is why the debate of whether or not back plates actually do anything for cooling really depends on the way it's applied to the back of the GPU if they're just stuck on there with screws and they're not touching anything on the back then they're not offering any cooling benefit whatsoever but the nice thing about ek back place is they actually do offer some cooling benefit now what you can do right now before we get to the back plate is just kind of hold it up to your graphics card and you can see which screws are actually going to be used through the back plate right here so you can just kind of go okay well these two screws I can go ahead and put in there these guys right here I can go ahead and put in there and then the other ones are going to be screwed through the backplate now these two screws up here in the front actually you're going to use the longer screws that come with the ek kit because they are going to be using a nut to actually hold them together because the block doesn't come over that far but it does come with these with these little nuts nuts and you're going to just screw those together and they're going to squeeze together to hold the front plate together to the graphics card otherwise the whole graphics card would just kind of flop around so you're going to do that for both of the two farthest forward screws at least for the 980ti remember guys your applications may vary ok so if you weren't doing a back plate then you would just go ahead and do these last two or last four screws here and then you would be done but of course we are doing a back plate so we're going to do now is we're going to apply the thermal pads to the back of the inside of the back plate here and then we will screw it on and then we'll be done I'm a little disappointed in the way that when you do this square here that you have to actually cut two pieces to make it fit because ek used to give you a square that was pre-cut to fit in there lately they've been kind of cutting that corner and not doing that for you so that's kind of unfortunate but other than that I mean I guess it's not it's not too bad so we also we're going to need to put a strip of one millimeter right here on this guy now the hardware that came with your back plate is the hardware that you're going to use on the back they're not the same screws as you can see these are sort of a stainless steel they're entirely different in fact they give you more than you even need but hey that's good right so we're going to do is we're just going to push these through and we are not going to tighten these down until we get all of the screws into all of the holes for the same reason I mentioned earlier now two of these on the back here actually I need to mention are going to be very similar to the front where I mentioned that we have the the nuts that go through there's going to be a couple longer screws that are going to go in the back here as you can see maybe you can't but they provided two nuts that go on the back as fun to say it give you two nuts that go on the back and that's where those these these nuts are here going to go with the longer screws well there she is one gtx 980 with a brand new EK nickel waterblock on there last thing to do is take off the little protective films on the ek logo and installer in your brand new or maybe it's not brand new but your new water-cooled graphics card into your PC well there you go guys it makes a little bit of a mess behind me as you can see but then you end up with one sexy-ass graphics card I really like the way that the nickel water block or the back plate looks on this thing especially when you have a white build like I'm doing unfortunately it shows fingerprints and stuff really badly I have to clean this off but yeah I think it looks freakin amazing look at that Oh like a signal airplanes with this thing alright guys well there you go let me know what other how-to you'd like to see we will do some more how to's with this build behind me as it's going together anyways thanks for watching guys and as always we'll see you in the next one