I was totally surprized when I cranked this thing up with the new block. I've read all the hype about it online and figured that maybe I'd get a little improvement, but this is more than I had expected from just swaping out a block. My old standard APOGEE even had a great contact patch between the CPU IHS and water block base as well, so this improvment is basicly all block.
But the damn this is expensive, even over here in the States, almost twice as much as the old APOGEE.