Alphacool still shipping the 4090 core block with wrong thermal pads, some people get lucky and some people get fucked. They just send whatever they found on the factory floor that day. It's a fucking disaster and support is a joke claiming 70C and 30C hotspot delta is totally fine, Taking the customer for a fool. And it's been a known issue for a over a year.

Went from 2x360 to triple 180 rad. 600rpm fans. No way a 240 rad could run 450w. But thanks for trying!

You did not explain at all why the slanted design.. what i was looking for.

Negative, the Optimus signature v3 performs noticeably better than any alphacool block in existence. So it seems to be good, but not a “winner” maybe top 3

i just got dell precision m6800 as used yes day it came with Rise of the Tomb Raider. i do own that game iit came with 250 gb ssd boot drive I replace my hard drive 500 gb to 2 TB SSD for games. so it best laptop i had so far

EXCELLENT testing and great insight of the performance comparisons across the product range... keep up the amazing work.

Thank you for your hard work. This gave me the information I needed!

Distroplates always looked like more hassle than it is worth in my opinion.

Könnte mir jemand helfen? Kann ich 16/12 EKWB-Anschlüsse an einem Alphacool Core 1 anbringen? Oder schaffe ich es nicht, sie einzuschrauben?

Great video brother, easy to follow. Repasted my launch TUF 4090 since I was getting over 100C hotspot temps and crazy fan revving. Hotspot is now below 80C and much better overall temps

I wouldn't call a centimeter gap between shroud and fins a waste. It is theoretically a benefit to performance to help reduce fan hub deadzone. And I figure on these ultra-thick rads they wouldn't assume that space is at enough of a premium to cut down. As I see it the gap is a feature, tho the practicality of it is hard to say. A gap on the panel side without fans is truly a waste.

This channel has produced some of the best and most interesting PC content over the years. Thank you for all of the work on this project.

Distroplates are just for the optic use them with hardtubes and they look amazing with coloured fluid. If you want a watercooled pc and go for perfomance just do not use distroplates :)

Nothing wrong with BTF setups. It'll be a matter of time before the rest of the industry catches up and there's a plethora of clean build products that supports the new BTF genre. If anything, it eliminates the need for showing off colored cables... So, companies like Cable Mods might be sweating bullets right now.

I swear distro plates were made just to sell more fittings.

Extremely premium block, but that terminal is so out of place. It looks like one of those cheap aftermarket honda civic spoilers stuck on a bentley.

Good advice on the strength and do not pull out after once on and panic i like that lol.

You should check cpu and operating cpu in case

The idea that water moving slowly through a radiator will result in lower component temperatures is blatant misinformation. The name of the game is temperature delta. Heat exchangers are more efficient with higher temperature deltas, so the longer the fluid stays inside the radiator, the lower the delta will be between the coolant and the ambient air. Likewise, you’ll also see diminishing returns with increasing radiator thickness as the air heats up as it passes through the radiator and the temperature delta between the fins and the air decreases. This can be solved with extreme fan speeds and is why servers have such high speed fans, there is a lot of restriction and a lot of stuff to cool, so you need a lot of air moving very fast to not heat up as fresh air is better than slow air. Back to radiators. Surface area is important but so is flow rate. Normally flow rate isn’t a huge issue with good pc watercooling gear but the MORA looks just like an air conditioning hot end which are designed to have compressors pulling hundreds or thousands of watts to compress the refrigerant and push it through the loop, and that radiator probably offers no load compared to the work required to compress the refrigerant. A pc water pump might have a very hard time moving water through this. It looks like the Mora is just a heater core repurposed for pc watercooling and is far less than ideal. I’d really like to see some actual tests as speculation isn’t worth much and perhaps it’s just fine.

Watercool Heatkiller wrecked Optimus. They introduced the ULTRA coldplate.

IMO, these two products hide two of the best parts about a custom built water cooled PC. Interesting tubing runs and well managed and sleeved cables.

Can you test the best performing waterblock vs the weakest one both with liquid metal? I'm interested if the performance difference between blocks will shrink with better conductivity between the die and block.

can i use ekwb d5 for that disto plate?

EK=expensive AF for middling-poor performance Alphacool=best price-to-performance with minor design issues (e.g. physically blocking access to GPU BIOS switch with the Core block). Eisblock was over complicated with too many O rings and prone to leakage. Core line far better, simpler design, and great performance. Phanteks=formerly great, piss poor aftersales support for many years now, poor QC, defects common Heatkiller=The best, but 2x the price of alphacool for 5% better performance Optimus=0 aftersales support. They just do not care. Bitspower=good cost-to-performance but far away and they do not care about their customers or providing support

r/watercooling standard advice: 1x120 rad space per 100W as a minimum. More rad space = even cooler, run fans at lower speed. I run 3x360 with NF-A12x25 fans at 1000RPM for a 4090 and 12700KF and it just barely manages to cope at most medium loads without increasing fan speed (for silent but cool operation), and 1500RPM while gaming or rendering (albeit at higher temps than I'd like 45C on GPU core). I'm adding an additional 3x360 external rad so I can always keep the fans at 1000RPM regardless of load

Thank you for this video. I can add one thing to EK's full cover. To remove the “PCIe” plate - this metal part which you screw to the Pc case, you need to unscrew the backplate!!!! And they didn't include a one-slot plate!!! I won't buy the EK GPU block anymore. I can confirm everything you've said about the EK block. Good job and thank you.

750w 7900xtx here using 2 thin radiators in case mostly for show in case and a 1080mm bykski external, water doesn't get above 7-10c over ambient mostly

I run a EKWB EK-Quantum Surface P420M Radiator and EKWB EK-Quantum Surface S420 Radiator with 12 140mm EK Loop fans in push-pull, a MO-RA3 420 with 8 Noctua NF A20 HS-PWM chromax fans in push-pull and 5 more 120mm EK Loop fans in the case with my 14900K and 4090. Two reservoirs an EK 150 with its pump in the case and the MO-Ra3 with a 200mm Heatkiller with two Aquacomputer D5 pumps and 12 Koolance QD sets. Fans set to run by icue balance settings and on some games this setup still ramps up to 100% fan speed which is 970rpm on the MO-RA3 (its set to always run at 100%) and 1200-2000 on the loop fans depending on if its the 140 or 120 fans.

I am using Mo-Ra 420 for my 4090 . And another Mo-Ra 420 for my CPU :) Fans @ 300-700rpm.

👍 nice --Thx for the video

hey when you get the heatkiller ultra you should compare the regular against the ultra

I really wish they made Heatkiller blocks for MSI. I used to always buy EVGA or Asus and never had an issue getting every variety of waterblock. This time, I bought an MSI Suprim and there are very few options. I ended up with a cheap Byski block, which works fine, but I'll definitely be buying an ASUS gpu for 50 series.

Great video Daz! So much info, and I agree 100% about EK

Really great content - thanks very much

Thanks for your detailed breakdown opinion of the pros and cons of each block. Most interting.

You have a GPU that weights like >8lbs and you are still installing horizontal?! Hitting the RAM isn't your problem, it's horizontally mounting your GPU. I don't understand why everyone isn't vertically mounting their GPU considering how heavy GPUs are and how brittle lead free solder is, especially with a dual water block GPU.

thank you for this demo, cheers

Nice video very complete and useful, what app do you use for your Benchmarks garphics ?

Thx for the video. Prices are nuts these days :(

Does this block work on the strix oc version?

It would be great to make a showcase of all of them with the emphasis on your results and observations. I would like to change EK for something better and cheaper and lighter :)

Good job, as always. I can add that EK Is getting worse over time. For example, for GTX 1080 ti, they added a single-slot PCIe plate. Now I had to use original three slot plate which looks ugly!!! And the quality is not there. I have to reapply the pads because they are visible - the design of the block’s acrylic parts is not well thought out. And the weight??? Omg… it is HAEVY! I am so disappointed with this block. And remember that it won't fit everywhere. You need a space for active backplate. Overall thank you for the comparison. Keep doing what you're doing have been doing :) only you and singularity are worth watching :) thank you.

Hi, was this the Watercool Heatkiller Ultra or were you able to test the Ultra Pro with the new coldplate?

90 percent time this company doesn't even respond.

Although this is a nice concept, it makes it that much more of a pain when you have to take things apart to clean or flush out the system or if you have to re-paste the CPU later on. What makes it even tougher is how to configure how you’re going to get the tubing now on the back of the motherboard when there’s not a lot of space typically on the back end of the case you’re using, when you have a lot of cables involved. Again nice concept, but this is going to be interesting to see how these new PC cases now need to be redesigned to fit this kind of water block on the front and back with this new type of front and back water block configuration. Also, how much cooler does your PC run as a result of the front and the back being water cooled at the same time? More than likely, there won’t be any change in temperature at all.

Analyzing all this data i think Alphacool core is the best overall.

Supertest, always the most careful reviewer that has surprisely low viewers. I love Daz since long time :-)

I really like the bykski blocks.

IMHO 1C delta is within measurement margin of error, so there is no difference between blocks in gaming but there is some difference in rendering scenarios that use 100% GPU Very interesting test. Alphacool core seems to be the best mix of cost-to-performance and build quality. I had an Eisblock on my 3090 but the acrylic terminal and more complex design means there are more points of faillure I tested it compared to the Phanteks G40, and it absolutely blew the G40 out of the water. Phanteks just doesn't care about build quality and tolerences nowadays, and 1 of the 2 blocks I bought came with the wrong size pads on the memory (2mm instead of 1mm). When I reached out to them Phanteks was completely unhelpful.

the dT of the water in/out is 100% a measurement of the effectiveness of the block, the heat absorbed by the water * the amount of water pushed through the block is the absorbed energy by the water => cooling. If a block has low flowrate it needs a higher dT to have the same effectiveness as a block with high flowrate. So you can calculate the cooling performance by those 2 factors (+the starting temp of the water).