So yesterday UPS arrived like 3 days early with my package (who am I to complain?), and I got my new Alphacool Eiswolf. Time to rip the system apart, fix my cable mess after my latest PSU incident, and get that bad boy installed...
Everything disassembled, cleaned off, shiny! Ready for assembly.
...And this happens. One of the aluminium bolts snapped in two while screwing it into the passive GPU block. I wasn't even using force, however the threads were a bit rough. Not anything I would worry about normally since this isn't uncommon with water blocks. Fortunately it didn't impact the stability of the installed block once the back plate came on.
Finally done. I actually managed to assemble the graphics card without taking apart the hoses using the QDC. I was reluctant to unscrew those QDC, as I've seen they can drop quite a bit of water. These QDC are really cheap and ugly as hell, but oh well the price wasn't really that high anyway.
Everything is good to go, here's a few more pictures
Look mom, no sag!
So final words:
I had a few issues assembling this. Nothing I couldn't handle though, but for someone who's doing this their first time... I would say don't! The manual is both good, and lacking also. There are a few places where they clearly could improve on. For example how to properly prepare and disassemble your graphics card. Also there were 3 plastic washer included which were also mentioned in the manual that they are included, but no where did Alphacool indicate where they're supposed to be placed. Truth be told I was slightly confused about this LOL, but in the end I just left them out. Seemed to work out fine.
Regarding the thermal pads, it's really nice to see Alphacool cutting them into their correct size (well mostly), and also how they describe their placement in the manual with color codes, is really smart. Thumbs up for that! Unfortunately Alphacool chose to slack on the quality of these thermal pads, meaning they don't stick to anything. When you peel off the protective film on both sides, it does actually feel like they're sticky. But once placed on the PCB, they will fall off very easily. I fixed this by using a tiny amount of thermal paste on all the chips, so the pads would stick. Worked out fine in the end, however I didn't do this on the PCB's backside, as I didn't felt comfortable smudging the PCB with thermal paste all over.
One last issue I had was the fact that Alphacool seems to have either forgotten or chose to not include two small nuts, so you can tie up the IO plate to the PCB. On the original cooler the screws go into a thread on the other side, but it doesn't here. I was lucky I had a few of these laying around, because if you ignore this you can actually risk your graphics card flexing a bit. Nobody wants sag...
Regarding temperatures: It hit about 52C after 30 mins at default clock. The card boosted itself to 1873 MHz. You can get better results depending on which case you use, airflow and so on. I run my fans rather quiet. Usually my Noctua iPPC fans don't go above 45% in speed, but considering Valley benchmark hardly uses any CPU load, the RPM was likely around 500-600 RPM. I say that's rather impressive actually.
I also installed a 12v to 9v adapter on the pump, as the hum coming from the pump felt a bit annoying to me. Actually it's just as noisy as an Asetek, even though Alphacool says the opposite. My unit certainly wasn't "silent", but I can live with it.
Valley benchmark results:
