Gadgetory

welcome to another unboxing on widest actives this is the alpha cool env XP and Vidya GTX 670 stainless steel polished water block from alpha cool pretty much this is what we're planning to use on our on our BitFenix liquid cooled machine so we're gonna use a GTX 670 and this alpha cool block in order to achieve the cooling performance that we need in a small form-factor liquid cooled machine the thing about the 670 is it's such a low profile video card that it is perfect for a low profile liquid cooling installation so you might have noticed that compared to my standard HTC 8x phone size comparison that I've never done before now or maybe once before now that this is not a huge water block and the reason for that is the 670 appears to be a large graphics card at first but when you turn it around it actually has like an extension that's only made of plastic I'll get slick to come in and have a look at this for us an extension that's only made of plastic that goes beyond the size of the PCB here so this block is a perfectly appropriate size for this particular card that makes sense to you so why did we decide to go with this one well veil ability helps and alpha cool has been around a long time making water cooling gear so let's just go ahead and see if I can figure out how to like why did you do this look at this it comes in like a food package see it's like it's like vacuum sealed it's just I said oh okay yeah it's all good I mean I think I can think of one reason it's gonna prevent the copper from oxidizing if they have it sealed up like this because one of the things that drives me crazy about copper blocks is oxidized ugly stained copper so I'm going to be extremely careful not to oh that's going to be hard yep I have a solution do gloves I love the look of copper I hate the look of stained oak sized ugly car so we're gonna go ahead and put on some gloves to handle this I would highly recommend that you do the same thing it's not because of any sort of fault in fact the more pure the copper being used by the manufacturer the better the chance that it will be easily stained and look horrific after a little while so the top is a polished stainless steel although it's available in a variety of finishes so you can see how reflective that is we're gonna see if we can catch slick in the reflection bezel am i close I got him there we go that is how reflective the top of this block is it's actually only a very very slim layer of stainless steel covering the top of the block and it's two separate pieces of copper here that make up the overall construction so you can also see they're using allen key screws to hold the whole thing together very very securely I mean these are pressure tested so yeah now this is a bit of a unique thing so they're actually using a little bit less material to make up the block itself here it used to be that you'd see the threads themselves made out of whatever material the block is in this case copper but what they've done is they've actually expanded the area here by putting like a threaded piece through it so that's sort of a unique approach it looks like it allows them to save on some of the costs of the block but it shouldn't affect performance and it shouldn't affect the ability of the block to to accept larger threaded fittings so that was that was a big problem for a while as some fittings like the older DTEC Barb's had threads that were like this long and people were putting them through full cover blocks and they were going almost all the way through to where the other fitting would go on the other side and they were leaking because they weren't going in all the way so that's that's not going to be a problem with this one thing to be careful of with these water blocks is you want to make sure that you have a reference card so here they're giving you a little guidance thing for making sure that your card is actually compatible with the block before you get started so you can see right here all the places where you need to apply thermal pads so here for memory and memory here for the GPU itself and here for the VRM and let's see what else we got here ah yes their whole copper themed thing that I think is freakin awesome so here's some more thermal compound that's gonna be for the GPU core itself you don't use a thermal pad for that and then copper stoppers I would probably go ahead and use nickel plated stoppers just because that'll be more consistent with the overall look that I'm going for in my build but I think that pretty much covers it don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos