The Danger Den DD-GTX 470 Full Coverage GPU Water Blocks

The DD-GTX 470 water blocks arrived in plain white boxes and Dan was nice enough to include a few of the old stickers to come along with. You will see later I did find a good use for the stickers.

Opening the box, you will find a water block sandwiched between two layers of egg crate foam. In a separate bag, shipped under the bottom layer of foam you will find all of the needed hardware. The instruction sheet is folded up and placed on top of the foam, and was removed for this image.

From the top you can get a look at the satin copper finish and the attractively etched, smoked acrylic. Pro tip to those who plan to buy these, make sure your hands are very clean or wear gloves; you can see on the left side just how easy it is to "print up" the surface.

On the underside, you can see all the milling it takes to make a block of this caliber come to life from a solid block of copper. There are five rectangular protrusions to cool the three sets of RAM and the voltage controllers. The three RAM coolers make direct contact while the power management cooling using a thermal interface material between them and the block. The large spiraled area is the GPU die mating area. As I said, not what I would call lapped, but even with the mill marks, it offers a relatively flat surface to mount to.

From that angle the milling marks look really bad, but once you get it in a different light, you can tell the finish is quite good, and the barb reflects in the memory cooler in the top right. The nine small bumps are to support the PCB and keep it from flexing, and are used in conjunction with factory holes in the card for mounting.

With a razor blade held across all the mounting surfaces, they are true and level with no deviation across them. While they may not be done in a mirror finish, the surface will handle the transfer of heat from the die to the water with no problems.

Danger Den does pre-test these blocks and when done and satisfied, they place this sticker on to keep the end user from taking it apart and damaging it, or screwing up the replacement of the top and blaming it on Danger Dens workmanship. I do not suggest you do what I am about to do. I am doing it so you won't have to with yours.

I removed the sixteen screws to reveal the innards. Around the outside of the water chamber Danger Den uses a flat gasket more than a typical washer to seal this off. Flow inside the chamber is uni-directional, so in my setup, whatever makes it easier to install is going to be the way they flow.

The ten "C" shaped ribs take the heat from the base and expose it directly to the flow of the water for transference to the radiator for removal.