Building AMD Ryzen mini ITX Gaming PC with Alphacool Water Cooling

Closer Look at the GPU Cooling and the Performance

At the beginning couple of photos of the Alphacool Eiswolf GPX-Pro and later you will see installation steps.

In the package we can find everything we need for installation. There are all components, thermal pads, Alphacool XPX-1 thermal grease and user’s manual.

The same as the Eisbaer also the Eiswolf comes with quick-release connectors so you can add water blocks to the loop in a really easy way. However for our needs standard fittings will be better option.

The Eiswolf has been installed on the Gigabyte GTX1070 Founders Edition which I had for some time but it was quite noisy under high load comparing to other PC components. The card comes with reference Nvidia cooler. Personally I like this cooler design but as I mentioned, it’s not really quiet while GPU is under load and card’s temperature is quite high so it’s time to make some improvements.

Removing all screws take some time but better be careful as it’s easy to damage the card. Before you start, check if you have all required tools. Even though the Eiswolf comes with everything required for water cooling installation then you will still need additional tools to remove old cooler.

I won’t hide that removing cooler was the worst part. After that it’s good to clean GPU with some alcohol or other liquid designed for that and we can start with thermal pads.

Most of the thermal pads are exactly the size you need. Some you have to cut yourself. I cut a bit different shapes than it was in the manual but all is in the correct places and fits perfectly.

All thermal pads are in the marked bags. Each bag has its color which is described in the manual. If you stick to the manual then you can’t make it wrong. All is well described with pictures.

It would be easier to install heatsink and backplate if thermal pads were a bit sticky. You have to be careful so all thermal pads stay in the correct places. Check that twice as it’s really important part of the installation.

Above you can see how the card looks like with Alphacool Eiswolf installed. I’ve used 45° compression fittings but if you have more space in the case then of course you can use some other fittings.

The Eiswolf looks simple but at the same time I like this design. Not so flashy and has radiator with large surface so additionally removes heat.

Before the Eiswolf installation we could see throttling because of too high temperature under full graphics card load. Temperature was reaching 85°C while the Eiswolf won’t let it go above 40°C while playing games. At the same time all is nearly silent while standard Nvidia cooler was causing a lot of noise.

Idle temperature is about 29°C while load temperature in games is reaching 37°C.

There is also one more good reason to use water cooling. On stock Nvidia cooler, our graphics card’s boost clock couldn’t go much above 1750MHz. On the Eiswolf it’s reaching 1911MHz! All that without any overclocking.

There is still some headroom for overclocking but about that you can read on the next page of this review.