So one of the fan's on my 7870 died. It's less than a year old, and I could probably RMA it, but I don't have a spare card and don't want to buy a cheap card to get by on, ship it all over the world, etc. It ran warm before, in the high 70's, and was hitting 80's with the dead fan.
So my local computer place had the NZXT G10 water cooler bracker on sale, and a Corsair H55 on sale as well. So I figured $70 was worth it to try to save my card and worst case, I could take it back minus a 10% re-stocking fee, so $7 to try.
I have a Sapphire 7870, and it's apparently not based on the reference design. lol. The bracket fit though, it's just a bit further down the card than it's supposed to be. The H55 fits well in it. The Sapphire card has a slimline VRM heatsink on it already, so I didn't have to worry about that. The fan on the G10 cools the RAM.
So I got it all together, fired it up. Temps around 43c in Heaven Benchmarks on Ultra. Then red screen. Checked to make sure the pump was plugged in, rebooted, red screen. Freaking out, I tear it all apart and realized I didn't fully tighten the screws holding the water block to the GPU. lol.
I tighten it, fire up Heaven bench, 47c after the full benchmark run of 26 stages. OC'd my card 150mhz over stock, hit's about 51c. RAM and VRM on the bottom of the board is cool to the touch.
Fired up BF3. 45c, Ultra everything 16x/4x, etc, maxed out.
Very impressed with it. My case is so quiet now too. CPU/VRM temps seem a bit cooler too. I think the GPU was just dumping extra heat in the case. Now it's exhausted out.
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nzxt g10 rocks saved 7870 cool chill