Old water blocks, what to do with them?

[Scoob]

Hi all,

Odd question maybe, but after a few years using water cooling in my gaming PC, I'm building up a little store of old GPU water blocks.

Basically I started off with two miss-matched GTX 570's, one of the original long PCB editions (same as 580) plus one of the newer, short "HD" editions. I fitted different water blocks to each. After the original 570 developed a fault, I replaced it with a second GTX 570 HD, so had to buy another water block for that.

Eventually, these GPU's were replaced. I popped the Air Coolers back on these and used them to upgrade a couple of older PC's - the 570's were a bit overkill, considering what the PC's are used for, however they were far less power hungry than the GPU's already there, so still a good choice.

This left me with three perfectly good EK GPU water blocks. Two suitable for the smaller GTX 570 HD, and one suitable for the original large PCB GTX 570, which also fits the GTX 580.

I got myself a pair of GTX 680's at a good deal - ironically only a month or so before the 780 was announced, ah well! Put a pair of beautiful Alphacool Nexxos GPU Blocks on these - copper and brushed steel, they look lovely - and have run these for a while now.

So, I've had the GPU upgrade itch for a while now, a single GTX 980Ti should, in theory, out perform my pair of 680's even if said 680's are scaling perfectly. I'd also get a huge benefit from the 6gb VRAM in certain titles.

I'll remove the water blocks off the two 680's, pop air coolers back on them and re-purpose them elsewhere. However, this will leave me with two more pristine GPU water blocks that only fit what is rapidly becoming obsolete (from a high-end gamer perspective) hardware.

So, my question is, what should I do with these old GPU blocks? I don't think there's a market for them - I found that out when the GTX 570 blocks originally became spare, no one appeared to want them. Can these be recycled some how? Is there any value in them? These are quite sizeable chunks of copper after all.

If anyone did want any of these blocks - only the older 570 one are available currently until I upgrade - I'd happily sell them, likely just for P&P + a little beer money so to speak, as I'd be happy just to see them used again.

What do people think, what are my options? To be fair, I'd likely have updated the 680's to 980Ti's by now if it wasn't for the extra effort required when upgrading a water cooled system. Plus, sensible thinking suggests I wait for Pascal, considering the premium price NV high-end always demands. Wouldn't want a new GPU to feel old only a couple of months into ownership

Any advice or general comments welcome, I've been pondering this for a while now & don't want to add to my collection of old water blocks!

Scoob.

 

[JR23]

I think even retailers face a similar dilemma with waterblocks, it either seems stuff gets discontinued and becomes extremely valuable and hard to find or the hardware becomes obsolete and they are totally worthless. It's already happening with 7XX series blocks so with 5XX and 7XX it must be ridiculous.

Manufacturers love to re-use old PCB's, the short PCB 970's share their design with loads of earlier cards from quite a long way back. Similarly I have 780 Classy Blocks which will fit the 980Ti's so i'd imagine they will retain some value to me and to others for a while yet.

GPU blocks are kind of too specific for it to apply to but mosfet/chipset/memory/cpu blocks could be re-purposed as blocks for different things like M.2 drives, RAID cards or PCI drives with a little modification.


Both acrylic and copper are easy and from a large scale perspective definitely worth recycling BUT you will need a massive amount of waterblocks to get any meaningful money out of the raw materials.


The best way I can think on to get them most value out of them would be to just keep using them with the cards they are paired with. If your going to hand them down to a lesser system get an expandable AIO for those and smash some cards in. Watercooling isn't that expensive when you aren't trying to make it look pretty or perform optimally. The older hardware is still good for something.

Having said that if I was building a rig purely for aesthetics then picking up older cards with great looking blocks on very cheaply could be excellent, as a whole package sometimes they can be really appealing. An old block on it's own though is never really going to sell.

Could just look at them? Hmmm... waterblocks.

JR

 

[Scoob]

I wasn't aware some of the older blocks could be used on newer hardware. I've designs that were very similar, bar the placement of a single group of items making one block totally incompatible though lol.

I did wonder about re-purposing the blocks for something else, but I really don't have any other hot items in my various PC's.

Adding water cooling to the PC's the card were moved to so I could leaved them blocked up was something I thought about. However, it was going to be a bit of a mission - lots additional of bits to buy - plus the cases really didn't offer any support for water cooling as the systems were originally spec'd with pure air in mind. It'd cost me far more in bits to keep using the blocks than the original purchase price of the blocks. Add to that the systems currently housing my now air-cooled 570's are running cool and quiet as they are.

Heh, I did actually debate mounting the blocks on a bit of wood in a sort of arty display, and hanging it on a wall in the room most of my PC's reside in. As the blocks are largely worthless money-wise (for re-sale) and I have no use for them, I'm actually leaning more towards that option now

Or I could just leave them in the box, tucked away out of sight...lol.

Scoob.

 

[BluD]

I have a big container in the back of my wardrobe with a few water blocks in, i've thrown most of them out but ive probably got about 10 or so sitting around in there, even some of the early danger den maze blocks. I wish i still had some of the ones i threw out, especially the ones i made my self when there was no blocks available for my hardware.