New WC Trends

I've been out of the scene for a while and chugging along contently with my current WC setup, but it's time to do some upgrading. I am looking at getting a new GPU and adding it to my loop. While looking around at the new blocks out these days, I have noticed more and more acetal and nickel WB's on the market and one place even mentioned, in passing, their use due to benefits in water cooling, but never elaborated. I'm just curious what has spurred this new trend and what benefits they refer to. What are the ups and downs to using either acetal, nickel, or any combination of them with each other or standard copper?



P.S. For anyone that is interested, the upgraded system will be a single loop through a BI GTX480 Rad to cool an i7-930 and most likely a GTX 470 GPU.

Bi Gtx480 are old.
Xspc RX / Pa 120.4 are the best one on the market and mcr 320/420 are the best/price/perfo rad.
The block are made of copper and plated nickel etc.... (for the silver look i supose) :0
skinneelabs.com will get u a ton of info about the newest cpu block - rad etc. etc.
if link dont work. google it...

Yes, the BI GTX480's are a bit old. I'm only using it because I already have it. That is what is in my current loop setup. I was asking in the thread more for info regarding the new materials and such.

I was able to find some information regarding them which basically amounted to the following:

Nickel is less corrosive than copper and the thermal performance difference between them is pretty much negligible. That being said, the corrosive rate of copper is so slow that it is not really an issue to worry about for a typical loop.

The use of acetal is meant to replace lexan or plexiglass (usually in WB tops) because it is a much stronger and reliable plastic than those others. So an acetal top will typically last longer without any cracking, breaking, leaking, etc.


Thanks for the input Grosjambon. I ended up going with the EK FC-480 Copper/Acetal waterblock. That and my old Fuzion 2 will be cooling my GTX 480 and i7-930 once it all gets here. I'm still going to reuse the BI GTX480 rad as well. I'll be sure to update everyone on how things turn out.