Well I got my chipset and video card water blocks from BE Cooling yesterday.
First I would like to say that I was a little disappointed in the design. Though functional, really all you have for your money is a piece of copper bar with 3 drilled and tapped holes. 2 holes contain the input and out put barbs the third connects the first two to make a U shaped channel.
I guess I’m still a bit disappointed in not getting the blocks from Overclockers hideout, but their shipping cost where totally outrageous…
So I got home around 6 to find these babies waiting for me. They were in rough shape when I pulled them out of the box. The copper was tarnished and the faces had small pits and scratches in them. Silicon or teflon tape<I'm not sure what it was> was haning out of the plugged holes. My general impression was that these blocks were slapped together without to much concern for attention to detail.
I decided to give them some TLC so I went out to the local body shop and bought some sandpaper 200, 320, 400, 600, 1000, and 1500 grit I couldn’t find any 2000. I also bought a new toothbrush for scrubbing in those hard to reach places.
At first I was a bit reluctant to use the 200 however on my video card block one of the barbs was installed incorrectly. The bolt part of the barb was not turned flat and level with the surface of the block. Instead the bolt part of the barb had one of its pointed edges sticking up an full 1/8 of an inch above the surface of the block, this made it necessary to use some heavy grinding to remove the edge.
This picture shows the barb after I ground it flat. The barb in question is the one on the left.
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/flatenedbarb.jpg[/URL]"]
Once I had the edge taken off I started moving my way up through the grits. I used only one strip of each grit for each block. The strips were about the width of the blocks. Going from 320 to 1000 only took about 20 minutes. However, 1500 to final polished finish took about one hour for each block.
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/chipsetvideo.jpg[/URL]"]
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/chipsetvideo2.jpg[/URL]"]
First I would like to say that I was a little disappointed in the design. Though functional, really all you have for your money is a piece of copper bar with 3 drilled and tapped holes. 2 holes contain the input and out put barbs the third connects the first two to make a U shaped channel.
I guess I’m still a bit disappointed in not getting the blocks from Overclockers hideout, but their shipping cost where totally outrageous…
So I got home around 6 to find these babies waiting for me. They were in rough shape when I pulled them out of the box. The copper was tarnished and the faces had small pits and scratches in them. Silicon or teflon tape<I'm not sure what it was> was haning out of the plugged holes. My general impression was that these blocks were slapped together without to much concern for attention to detail.
I decided to give them some TLC so I went out to the local body shop and bought some sandpaper 200, 320, 400, 600, 1000, and 1500 grit I couldn’t find any 2000. I also bought a new toothbrush for scrubbing in those hard to reach places.
At first I was a bit reluctant to use the 200 however on my video card block one of the barbs was installed incorrectly. The bolt part of the barb was not turned flat and level with the surface of the block. Instead the bolt part of the barb had one of its pointed edges sticking up an full 1/8 of an inch above the surface of the block, this made it necessary to use some heavy grinding to remove the edge.
This picture shows the barb after I ground it flat. The barb in question is the one on the left.
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/flatenedbarb.jpg[/URL]"]
Once I had the edge taken off I started moving my way up through the grits. I used only one strip of each grit for each block. The strips were about the width of the blocks. Going from 320 to 1000 only took about 20 minutes. However, 1500 to final polished finish took about one hour for each block.
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/chipsetvideo.jpg[/URL]"]
[img="[URL]http://plaza.powersurfr.com/MsNath/home/chipsetvideo2.jpg[/URL]"]
It did how ever add a bit of an extra shine to the blocks. I used tartar fighter and the recomendation was to use regular so maybe I would have had better results had I used the regular formula.
