An increasingly popular component to watercool is the GPU. With Nvidia and ATI cramming more and more cores into their cards in a bid to take the performance crown, cooling performance has been compromised. With lots of heat to expel and little space to do it within, modern cards have to rely on high revving fans to shift the vast quantity of heat they produce.

Watercooling won’t just silence a noisy graphics card, it will also reduce the temperatures massively – sometimes by as much as 50%!



The most common way to go about it is to use a full cover block – it takes care of watercooling the card's core, RAM, VRMs and any other toasty components. Unfortunately, blocks tend to be expensive, and a block designed for a 5870 will only fit a 5870, so with every GPU upgrade you need to buy a new block.

The other method uses a core only block, which has movable mounts, so will work with most cards currently available. You then use a number of small heatsinks dotted around the card to cool all the other components (Ram, VRM’s etc). Whilst this may save you money, it doesn’t quite deliver the visual appeal of a full cover block, nor the cooling performance – with all the heatsinks used you still need a reasonable level of airflow to cool the card.



Therefore, I decided to go for a full cover waterblock as I needed to ensure the card would still work without airflow over it. EK's 5870 v2 block is the only one available that fits my card, so a nickel-plated, plexi topped version was ordered (to be in keeping with the theme of the build). Despite taking my time (making sure not to break anything), installation took just under an hour, which isn't bad at all. If anyone is considering watercooling their graphics card, all I can say is read the instructions! Instructions typically end up in the bin, but they were absolutely essential in the installation of the waterblock.