Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A vs. Radeon RX 6900 XT in the test – ground frost or Sahara?

Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A vs. Radeon RX 6900 XT in the test - ground frost or Sahara?

Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A vs. Radeon RX 6900 XT in the test – ground frost or Sahara?

With the Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A for the new RX 6900 XT, 6800 XT and 6800, AMD now also has the right cooler for the current Radeon cards. We don’t quite have Big Navi on Ice yet, but the chip and circuit board are at least really nice under water as a well-cooled submarine. Such a water cooling makes sense with power losses of the entire card of 300 watts and more and also creates real added value. Let’s start the whole thing now with the Alphacool product, since it was the first model available to me.

Scope of delivery and unboxing

The manufacturer has fundamentally revised the cooler compared to the GPX-A predecessors, which you will clearly notice later in the test, but all in good time. The edge design of the Plexi front is not really new, only the rest of the substructure has, as with the new GPX-N for the Ampere-RTX, been redesigned from scratch, which you will also notice. Unboxing and accessories? Let’s see what we can find in the box. What you get for just under 127 euros is a pre-assembled cooler with terminal including embedded 5V aRGB strips and a matching preci-dip adapter, a backplate with cooling function, two rimless plugs, screws, thermal pads and thermal paste. The manual is available in printed and digital form, exemplary.

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With which we can now elegantly move on to the water block. As with the NVIDIA new edition, Alphacool has carried out a complete redesign. Based on the given leave-out areas, it was possible to set up a rather thin cooling block and also to further reduce the remaining floor thickness above the GPU. With the design of the water flow, the electrical circuit board layout is taken up and the focus is on the thermal hotspots at voltage converters, GPU and the memory. The coils are deliberately not cooled at the same time, because if they become too cool, the scraping with high flowing currents also comes to the fore. This is an effect that no one really wants. Letting the Lorentz force run free is a bit counterproductive, because the cooling is sufficient and there is not a certain temperature window for such coils for nothing.

The back shows the use of materials very clearly. Due to the thinner material, the GPU can determine the actual surface area without increasing it, the slightly lower memory modules have an increase that allows the use of 1 mm thick, special pads. This is where the super-soft pads with a crumble factor are used, which can be adapted to almost any thickness below a millimeter without pressure. Interestingly enough, all AMD cards have not had any tolerance problems with the height of the package and the resulting final thickness of the layer between the memory module or MOSFET and the cooler base should be well below one millimeter.

The water block is 26.25 cm long, 13 cm high and 2.45 cm thick. Nickel-plated electrolytic copper is used as the material and the cooling fins are 0.6 mm thick. Unfortunately, there is no official information on the width of the sewer and the remaining floor thickness. The lid is made entirely of acrylic and the angular corners reflect the rays of the aRGB light strip nicely back and forth, so that the result is a fairly colorful, large-scale image. This is of course a matter of taste, as always. This also includes the excessive and visually very dominant use of O-rings, which in this amount do not make it easier to dismantle the block in an emergency for thorough cleaning. Perhaps Alphacool should think about a color other than black to make these inlays a little more subtle.

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The backplate is part of the scope of delivery and is actually not needed for cooling the back of the RAM modules, because they stay really nice and cool, as we will see in a moment.

Montage

The assembly is simple and does not have to be described explicitly. It is important that the pads are better placed on the cooler when they are placed on the cooler and not on the PCB so that they do not fall off or slip when the circuit board is turned over and placed on the cooler. Only the storage and voltage converter areas are occupied here. The two small pads can actually be left out, as the small buck controllers underneath hardly get lukewarm.

I also have to say a word about the thermal paste, because the chip is quite large. Ideally, you should use a slightly more viscous paste that does not contain as much silicone and that stays where you applied it and that bleeds out over time. For this reason, I have recently been using the Subzero from Alphacool or the Phobya NanoGrease Extreme, which are not advertised as extensively, but do it very effectively.

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Then you screw the whole thing together, connect the hoses and you’re done. Well, not quite, because of course you still have to connect the aRGB header to the motherboard. It’s quick and easy and compatible with every current motherboard with a 5V digital output.

For those interested, I have simply attached the manual as a PDF here, and the rest of the successful water fight is described there

Datasheet GPX-A


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