For some reason, watercooling seems to be increasing in popularity despite the marginal benefits, and now Inno3D is joining the fray with its own offering. In a press release Inno3d have announced that they are applying Alphacool's water blocks to its RTX 3080 and 3090 cards, calling them the Inno3D RTX 3080/3090 iChill Frostbite.
The Alphacool waterblocks feature a unique design with as much acrylic as the company can muster, making lots of the PCB and electronics underneath visible. Because of this, they should respond to the built-in RGB lighting quite nicely.
Naturally, the cold plate itself is made from nickel-plated copper for performance and corrosion protection, and Inno3D notes that you should be able to achieve 60 to 65c temperatures using 240 and 360mm radiators, though obviously this will also depend on which other components you have in the loop, pumps speeds, fan speeds, and ambient temperatures.
To stand out a bit, Inno3D is providing its own backplate with Inno3D styling.
The boost clock of the RTX 3090 iChill Frostbite sits at 1755 MHz, which is a hair above the reference 1700 MHz clocks. The RTX 3080 iChill Frostbite gets a slightly bigger bump to 1770 MHz over the stock 1710 MHz, though both cards should have a little extra overclocking headroom anyway. The memory clocks have been left untouched, leaving the 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on the 3090, and 10 GB of GDDR6X memory on the RTX 3080 iChill Frostbite running at factory clocks.
Other than that, the graphics cards don't differ from the company's air-cooled variants, featuring dual 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1 output. They come in at 226mm long and 135 mm wide, and despite being thin enough for single-slot use, they use a dual-slot faceplate for the rear IO.
No word on pricing or availability. Expect a premium for these cards over air-cooled variants, and availability will remain difficult until the RTX 3000 supply issue resolves.
