Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the Apple GXT a revision to from Swift tech there's a very good reason I am unboxing this particular little piece of water-cooling gear and that is because I will be using it for my ultimate liquid-cooled machine build guide which will include a liquid cooling component so I'm gonna go ahead and take everything out of the box and show you guys exactly what it comes with so the first thing we find is a couple of 1/2 inch beautiful plated G 1/4 barbed fittings there you go so those are four half inch tubing alright next we have some thermal compound that is Arctic silver ceramic if it's still the same thing it was years ago which is exactly what it looks like a very good quality thermal compound not the best but certainly far from the worst and non-conductive non capacitive very safe for use in your system here we have a couple of black worm drive clamps so you put your tubing over the Barb you put the worm drive clamp over the tubing then you tighten it up with a slot head screwdriver to make sure you got a nice tight seal in there can you see that okay yes you can all right next we have an install guide which is so easy with this particular glockl that does show you a couple of interesting little things Oh critical ok the water block side with the three screws must be parallel to the CPU locking leader fascinating that's probably just for maximum performance it might you know cost you a degree or two if you don't do it that way but fascinating okay so will bear that in mind right so let's have a look at the Oh No okay we've got an extra backplate so my assumption is that's an 11 56 pack weight and the one that is pre-installed here on the CPU block is actually a 1366 backplate so let's go ahead and yeah you peel that off for sure and I'll just take this apart a little bit before I try to show it to you Wow water blocks have come a long way since I got my last water block upgrade which was actually quite a little while ago this one looks just gorgeous all right and so Swift Tech has really upgraded their mounting hardware systems since the last time I installed a new block as well this thing is like rugged okay so there's your two back plates as I guessed yes this is the 1366 the only difference is just the spacing of the holes and you can actually see that Swift Tech has designed this particular block to easily slide back and forth so you can install it on 775 1155 1156 and 1366 you can remove those Stoppers and then you can take these off but really there's no need to unless you are going to replace the hold-down now as they mentioned the side with three here is going to be the side that you want to align with your with your CPU a retention arm okay so let's talk about the features of this particular block a little bit so this is the Apogee XT which is the successor to every other Apogee block my actual my first water block was actually an Apogee the original Apogee and like its predecessors it uses a pin matrix so you can see down into the block itself now it's a much tighter pin matrix than it used to be the apogee had pins that were probably oh wow they must have been about six seven times the size of those the apogee GT improved on that and then here we are with the XT so you can see actually what's really cool about this block is that it does have a central Inlet which is a design that came in fashion about three three four years ago and that's not all you also have the option of taking the central inlet and turning it around so that the one so your inlet is here remember the inlet is the one where the water goes in so go ahead I'll put the barbs on here for demonstration so the water goes in directly over your CPU core and then leader flows around inside the block cooling itself well not cooling itself heating itself cooling the CPU and then comes out the outlet but what you can do if you're not quite as worried about flow rate and honestly I've never been much of a flow rate guy I mean yes it makes a slight difference to the performance of a given water cooling system but it's not the end of the world what you can do is you can use an allen key to take out these six guys right here you can turn this around and then you can actually move the inlet over to this side which allows you to not only install these barb fittings but you can also install compression fittings instead because you'll have that extra clearance so that's that's a really convenient feature alright so I want to show you guys the hold-down mechanism Swift Tech has always taken hold downs very very seriously they were one of the first ones well actually they were the only ones for the longest time to even have an Intel approved hold down in terms of the amount of mounting pressure that it was applying to the CPU and in terms of the convenience that it applies to users they have made great strides compared to their competition over the years so I'm just going to go ahead and show you how this works first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna peel off the plastic covering and let's just do the finger test so you can see it's very shiny very shiny indeed okay and then I'm just gonna put that back on to protect the base because I'm not really ready to install it right now there we go peel off put back on wax on wax off all right and then what you do is you put this on the back of your board you take off those adhesive pads there stick it to the back of your board and the right positioning and then you screw these in now what Swift tech has done so well since very early days is implemented Stoppers so what Stoppers do is unlike their competitors like I said the mounting pressure being within Intel spec Swift tech actually puts in place a maximum here so you can see we screwed it in all the way it doesn't go in any further your spring controls the amount of tension that there is the amount of pressure there is on your CPU and that is how Swift tech prevents you from over tightening and bowing your motherboard which used to be a big concern a few years back when not everyone was including back plates with their CPU blocks so really what it comes down to for me in choosing the aqua GXT is that I wanted something that was very very easy very robust to mount and I wanted something that offered top cooling performance so this little guy hits both of those marks no problem thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to my NCI x-column channel as well as this channel so you can check out the ultimate build guide including a water cooling guide section