PNY Releases Self-Contained Liquid Cooled XLR8 GeForce GTX 580s

[Rob Williams]

Care to own a GeForce GTX 580, but don't care for the added heat that such a beastly graphics card can add to a PC? For quite some time, EVGA has been no stranger to releasing its high-end GPUs with water-blocks built-in, and now it seems that PNY is getting in on the action as well. Its latest XLR8 Liquid Cooled GTX 580s come in two flavors, one with built-in water cooling for the GPU, and another that adds CPU cooling into the mix.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Kougar]

Very interesting product... not only is the GPU core watercooled, but the rest of the card still receives dedicated air cooling of its own. Considering the VRM circuitry is usually one of the hotted parts of the graphics card, I'm very glad to see this.

I would think the GPU core alone would saturate that waterblock, so adding an overclocked CPU to the mix is probably going to really crank up temps. I'd be curious to see some GPU core & VRM temperature numbers on this one though.

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

I linked to this in the TKC forums, and one of the members (he's a pc enthusiast) made a good point.

I can tell you one thing, that single 120mm fan wont cool both a gtx580 and a cpu! IMO you'd be better off getting a decent air cooler for the CPU and cooling just the 580. Even then how well will the 120mm fan and rad cool just the 580?

Makes sense when you think about it...but wouldn't the air cooler take some of the stress off of the liquid cooler?

 

[Kougar]

I said as much myself, although in different words. But he's probably right, a single 120x radiator is not going to be enough to optimally cool an overclocked 580 core.. it'd do the job well, but there's still room for improvement. But throwing a CPU in the mix...

I use one of the better triple 120 radiators in my system, and regardless of if I load the CPU or GPU, the water temperature will rise several degrees raising the temperature of everything else in the loop. And the air coming out of the rad is already hot. Dropping the surface area by 2/3rds is going to be crazy... this would've been a much better product without the CPU cooling. Or at least double the radiator size.

The air cooler won't affect the GPU core temps as the waterblock is likely not joined to whatever fins are still inside the housing. It's just there to cool the RAM and VRM assembly...