Earthdog, writing for Overclockers.com, has just published a pretty in depth and detailed review of the EKWB Full Cover Waterblock for the GIGABYTE GTX 980Ti Xtreme graphics card. Earthdog gives us a solid intro to the product with great insight as to the installation process and of course the block’s efficacy regarding cooling and overclocking.

“Our first clean shots of the block below reveal EK has sent us the EK-FC980 GTX Ti XG – nickel with the acetal see-through top. The nickel is polished to a nice mirror finish on the side we see through the acetal. As mentioned in the introduction, the block covers the GPU, vRAM, and the VRM’s offering a complete solution for cooling everything relevant on the GIGABYTE GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming. The ports are your typical G1/4 so you can use any size fitting which threads into G1/4.”

Comparing the performance of the EKWB water block with the reasonably impressive air-cooling that GIGABYTE offers with their triple fan ‘Windforce’ technology, the water block offers significantly lower temperatures:

“...EKWB came out with another great looking part in their EK-FC980 GTX Ti XG which is made specifically for the GIGABYTE GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming card. In my cooling loop, it knocked temperatures down on load by at least 13 °C in gaming and 7 °C in stress testing with Furmark over its stock cooling solution. Mind you, this was not against a reference cooler but a pretty formidable cooler in their triple fan Windforce cooler, native to this card.”

Catch the full review on Overclockers.com