Gadgetory

all right well this is meant to be an installation guide for installing the GTX 480 full cover water block on the GTX 480 and I guess it's a bit of a guide for installing a full cover block in general should you want to do that okay so the first thing is you will need to have all of the necessary things you'll need a water block a video card please do this with a high end video card I've seen people like water cooling GTX 460 s by the time you spend a hundred dollars on water lock for that kind of card you might as well about a better one next you will need some thermal compound a Phillips head screwdriver usually although with the GTX 580 you'll need a Torx as well and then you will also need the instructions please follow these carefully read them carefully all of that good stuff so the first thing we're going to do is remove the stock cooler I haven't quite decided if I'm gonna do this video in real time or like how real time I'm gonna make it I think I'll have to sort of do the steps and then come back because things like removing screws from the back of a video Carter pretty tedious and it's hard enough to just kind of Yammer on about random things to fill the empty parts of my videos at the best of times but it mean this is just like graphics card cooler installation there isn't really much to talk about so yeah bear with me while I do this up once you've removed all the screws from the back of the card make sure you don't forget to do the ones at the end of the PCI bracket before you try to remove the cooler okay so now that the cards apart what I usually do at this step is take all of the thermal pads off of the card put them back exactly where they were on the stock cooler take all of these screws put them back into the stock cooler and then put it in a ziploc bag or wrap it in plastic wrap or something so that that's gonna still be there for you if you ever need to take off the waterblock and put the stock cooler back on either for warranty purposes or if you don't want to water cool that system anymore or whatever the case may be for this next step you'll need something that I forgot to mention you'll need some 99% isopropyl alcohol and you will need some TP or I mean ideally you'd use a lint-free cloth but I mean who has enough of those to throw away oh and this is interesting it's funny his timing is awesome because here's a protip for you I don't know if you can see this or not but there's actually a hair on the GPU from when I reapplied the thermal compound with the air cooler it's a multicolored hair so I'm pretty sure I know where it came from cat hey yeah you pretty sure it came from you so the next step is you take a little bit of toilet paper some isopropyl and you read it and then you remove all residue all everything you can get off of the thermal compound on the GPU as well as any leftovers of the thermal pads on the memory chips so you use the wet TP to remove it and then you should give it another good wipe down with a clean part you can see that even though it looked clean there was still quite a bit of residue on there find another clean part go again you want to make sure you're removing everything because that's gonna give you the best interface between the new waterblock and the stuff that you are trying to cool with it but I usually do after I've done a good few wipes once the toilet paper starts coming off pretty clean like that then I usually give it a wipe with a lint-free cloth which is normally whatever shirt I'm wearing because I care a lot more about my graphics cards than I do about my clothes and that way you can be sure that you haven't left any little remnants of the toilet paper fibers on the any of the surfaces yet another thing that I didn't account for us needing scissors so now we're going to cut the thermal pads to size so that we can put them all on the correct parts of the PCB well not the PCB we're going to put them on the ground the RM not on the GPU thermal pads do not go on the GPU and yeah so I think the only ones we actually have to cut are the RAM so you can see e Ches instructions or like that so they show you you cut for per so the easiest way to cut for is to cut half and then to cut half again so we're going to do that and that and then we end up with little thermal paths that are just the right size for a brand chip so when you're applying these please please please make sure you remove the plastic covers from both sides okay because if you leave those on you will be probably roasting your ram so good luck with that so I'm going to go ahead and apply all the round ones and then we'll cover the prm's after that these are kind of finicky this is going to take me a little while it's a lot harder to do this when you're trying to hold a camera at the same time so there it's applied just like that it's been a while since I've installed an ek full cover but it looks like they've actually really improved the way they do their instructions so you they clearly label sort of which pads are which and which ones go where and what they're supposed to cover so that sounds pretty outstanding so I'm going to do the MOSFET ones now which are on this one this one and this one which used to be square but I cut it down a little bit smaller because a lot it was like coming up to here at the edge of the card and the last thing you wanted to have it installed and be able to see the other side of the thermal pad just under the block when you look in the side of your case I don't know about you guys but you know I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to this sort of stuff so that would be that would be an unacceptable result to me and I would have to take the whole thing apart which is a real pain and I don't feel like doing that so as with anything water cooling it's way way better to do it right the first time than to try to correct it later so there I put on that one next I'm gonna apply this one and this one I don't really care if they stick out the bottom because I'll never see those actually I wouldn't see those I'm going to trim these two so I'm just put them well that was almost really funny and I haha I guess it's time to buy a new graphics card sort of way I made a small mistake the number three thermal pad is actually a little bit thicker than the number two thermal pad and I had misread the instructions here I thought three was supposed to go over this square here but actually you're supposed to cut it up and put it on these little guys right here so that is now done and then I used one of these trips that I figured I was being innovative and trimmed from the bottom of these to put up here so now everything is covered and I'm in good shape as always with water cooling and this is why I didn't make the mistake ultimately make sure you double check go through do a sanity check make sure that all of your bases are covered alright so next we're gonna put the reinforcer and we should please note that the orientation of the reinforcer is important one of the other key points when install a GPU waterblock is making sure you use the right screws for everything so you can see these ones are short the ones in the diagram for putting on the spacer or rather the reinforcer plate are short I'm going to use a technique that I call the innovative edge of the table technique so this allows me to screw something into the back of the cart without upsetting all the thermal pads that I have placed on the top so I just kind of get my head under it and it's great in there now this next parts a real pain and a total mess if you do it the way that ek recommends basically they say take some thermal compound put it on these little washers and then put them in place and hopefully that will help them stay in place and then take the card and position it over top personally I okay if I wasn't doing a guide for you guys and doing things by the book I would never use the washers the reason they exist is because certain people couldn't handle not over-tightening they're full cover water blocks and here hold on an Orientalist this way so that the PCI backplate is going to hang over the edge of the table so I can put it down cleanly make sure that I don't move those washers actually I better do this off-camera this is going to be tricky but anyway people couldn't handle not over tightening their water blocks so everyone started implementing standoffs and one is one way or another and basically if you don't over tighten it it's not necessary but since the manufacturer does recommend it I am recommending that you go ahead and use them although I personally am NOT going to cover them in thermal compound because that's a mess that I don't feel like cleaning up if I ever have to remove it thermal compound application is one of those hotly debated topics I'll be using icy diamond thermal compound okay and because this is such a large heat spreader I will be using a large amount of compound and I'm going to go ahead and use the X technique so when you got a big surface to cover the grain of rice sometimes doesn't really shut it Oh about how thick this stuff is it's hard to apply through a camera compared to when you're not trying to apply through a camera there we go so then I'm gonna go where I was before and take the moat this way come on okay I would recommend using well part of the problem is the rooms quite simple you know I'm just gonna show you against the end result well that's quite possibly the worst job of applying thermal paste ever but most important thing is that we've got really good coverage in the center and that it's got somewhere to spread out from so that the actual dye itself is maybe cooled so yeah do as I say not as I do that's terrible maybe use the line technique if you're in a cold room with icy diamond because this stuff is thick when it's cold so I've carefully lowered it down exactly where it goes since I'm not using the thermal grease technique to hold them in place a lot of them shift a little bit so all I have to do is take a screwdriver and make sure that I realign the the washer before I try to put the screw in which I've already done okay so now what I've done is I've gone ahead and put in all of these screws into the back of the graphics card now I've put them all in very very gently that is to say that they are they're not finger tight they're not any kind of tight I've put them in far enough that the screw touches the PCB but there is no typing going on right now so Carolyn I'm gonna do the last one these two where there's the weird hole for the fan in the PCB I'm supposed to use these plastic washers apparently so I've gone ahead and done that so I'm just gonna put that in there that is because there isn't a proper screw hole for those ones so if I tighten that too much probably so yeah you can see these are quite loose they're barely in there so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go around and I'm gonna tighten them all watch I'm using two fingers okay I'm not gonna overdo it I'm gonna tighten them about that much that's all you need you need contact you're not trying to mash the PCB into the block this is not like a CPU block where a ton of mounting pressure is going to make some kind of difference in performance so you just want to give them all a nice little turn there we go absolutely diversity there and always double check so once we've double-checked to ensure that we have all of the screws installed in the back of the video card it is highly recommended that you actually remove them all take the whole thing apart and then check for contact between the GPU and the block so that means if they if the thermal pad they're all still stuck to the block then you want to check all of the RAM chips and all of the MOSFETs to see if they have a little bit of grease enos looking to them if they're a little bit greasy looking because that means they were making contact and same for the GPU core you want to make sure that it's nice and well spread out on the block itself so that you can be sure that everything is going to be cooled because remember you can check the temperatures of the GPU but you can't take to check the temperatures of all this other stuff once you've got it installed in your system so you got to be sure that they're going to be cooled last thing is fittings for this you will need wealth fittings so I'm gonna be salvaging the older style of stop fittings because I really don't like the look of the new ones I find this much more aesthetically appealing so I'll be grabbing these from an old ek full cover 8800 block that I had lying around and I'm also gonna grab a couple 3/8 compressions fittings that are compatible with my water cooling system so basically when you're installing fittings you want to make sure a your o-rings are in the proper of position and be that they are tight most fittings these days have a recessed o-ring which means you can't over tighten them so feel free to crank on them the technique I used to install these which is going to make them impossible to remove by hand was I actually wrap the grip here and applause and then I use a pair of vise grips to tighten them down so those are not coming off unless I go my vice grips now so now I'm done the blocks sexiness factor has increased the cards sexiness factor by many times in my opinion and the installation procedure is complete as far as I'm concerned although some people would go further and buy additional back plates or buy replacement IO plates that are only single slot so that they can actually install cards in the slot next to the graphics card because this is now a single slot GTX 480 C alright so all that's left now is to install it in my system so I'll just take that apart and that's gonna go in there where the graphics card is right now thank you for checking it out and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings guides and whatever