First Water Cooling WorkLogFollow

Alright so I finally have some updates. I ordered my two 7970s, some compression fittings, 10 feet of tubing and all of that has come in. Next week I will be ordering my case and my second radiator so I can work on mounting those. This update concerns mounting those sweet EK water blocks to my 7970s.

First of the goods: Sapphire Radeon 7970 OC Version

The cooler for this card is freaking gigantic and almost weighs about the same as the water block. With that being said let the dismantling begin. This part was easy, remove the two screws on the bracket then undo the screws on the back of the board. Normally once all the screws are undone it takes a bit of effort to actually remove the cooler from the board but mine literally just separated on its own while I was unscrewing the screws.

Cooler Removed 1 (heat-sink)
Cooler Removed 2 (PCB)

Now with this card you will notice that there are some heat sinks over the ram and such after you remove the fans and heat-sink. Those are held on by some of the screws you undo in the first step and simple pop off with a bit off wiggling.


One heat-sink off
Second one off
Tim cleaned off

Using some 70% iso wipes and some 91% iso and Kim wipes with some q-tips I cleaned up the board. Second one cleaned up a lot better then the first since there was a small amount of tim I could not access to remove.

After cleaning I applied the thermal pads in the suggested area and applied some MX4. This probably took the longest since I made exact cuts for the thermal pads. For the MX4, I am a fan of the pea and rice grain in the middle way, though the instructions from EK say to make a cross. I compromised and made 4 small dots in a cross pattern.

Here is the finished product.


Edited, May 10th 2012 9:31pm by Alobont