This review is part of the R9-290X Water Block Roundup.
Watercool is an old hand at…. well… water cooling. They’ve been making blocks for ages and they are usually high performers with a quite sexy and unusual look. Today we’ll be looking at the Nickel-Black edition of the R9-290x full cover block which is more formally known as the Heatkiller GPU-X (cubed). It’s important to cube the gpu-x because of the x factor. Or something. Anyway here it is:
Or at least that’s the box which is pretty also but we’re interested in the block. Like their fellow Germans Watercool vacuum seal their block and protect with much foam:
Although this is probably overkill, we are big fans of overkill so it works for us! Accessories include thermal pads, an allen key wrench for those fancy button head screws and some lovely bilingual instructions that are almost unnecessary because everything is almost self explanatory. The thermal pads are pre cut and there is only one type of screw so how can you go wrong? The thermal pads are also extremely thin on the memory which is another plus.
As with AquaComputer the finish is beautiful – nickel plating that is like a mirror. The machining marks have all but vanished even on the back, while the front really is a mirror.
To make things even better Watercool even announced they are doing a windowed version of this block. Did they know that nickel + plexi is my easily my favorite thing in the world apart from beer, burgers and dual core gpus with 5 display ports? The block is even wickedly thin – this could be a single slotter if AMD hadn’t give us a useless double stack of old DVI technology.
Just look at that – stupidly thin and shiny and looking like an arrow:
And you know what there’s a matching nickel plated backplate too just to complete the package. Sadly we didn’t get one of those in our care package. But if you’re interested you should know that it doesn’t include any thermal pads so it will not be helping (most likely slightly hurting) the temperatures shown in the thermal results.
The block is very simple to take apart – first remove the raised section:
Then the top plate can be removed:
Some nice surface area on the VRM section there.
Thermal Results
For greater detail in thermal results vs flow and block restriction check out this page.
The heatkiller like most of watercool blocks is on the restrictive side, however performance on core cooling is great at low flow rates which the following graph hides quite succesfully. Bear in mind that low flow is where most multi-gpu users will be running and so this is actually a good choice for many end users.
The heatkiller doesn’t just stop at core temps either, it has the best results for VRM cooling for a block without a backplate. If watercool had only made a backplate that could enhance the cooling then this block might have cinched a gold award!
Summary
Another beautiful block from team Germany – excellent performance on the core and VRMs particularly at low flow where it counts most. An active backplate would have given AquaComputer a run for their money but as it is Watercool will have to settle for silver!
Where to buy: Block – $137–142, Backplate – $37
Overall 8/10
Back to the R9-290X Water Block Roundup.
