Swiftech MCW-60 + MC8800 SMC cooling kit - Up Close & Install

Once everything is installed and your card is ready for action, expect to see something like this:



Nice rounded edges, a slick black body and a chromed mounting kit... cosmetic appeal certainly isn’t a problem with this block.



The Geforce 7 (and older) mounting kit features a back plate with a soft rubber positioned central in order to prevent your card from bending.



The internal block design exists out of an array of diamond shaped pins which increase surface area. This patent pending technique is also used with the Apogee GT and has proved its high thermal efficiency already with high end CPU's.



Swiftech used a black plastic looking top made out of Acetal Co-polymer and should be more reliable against cracks compared to the traditional tops made out of Acrylic. Water access is provided by 1/2" holes where the fittings can be screwed in. For compatibility with European water-cooling systems Swiftech added 1/2" fittings, as well as 3/8" and 1/4" fittings.



The base with its mirror finish adds up to glamorous looks of the MCW-60. Don't start to panic when looking at the base design. The lowered center area might not be big enough to cover the whole G80 heat spreader, though multiple heat spreader removal feedbacks have thought us that the actual G80 core is smaller then what its heat spreader makes you believe, and so the original MCW-60's base will do just great covering the heat spreader covering the G80 core where needed.



The MC8800SMC cooling kit exists out of 13 memory heatsinks where 1 actually is being used on the NVIO chip. Together with the 4 mosfet sinks all the heatsinks have pre-applied thermal pads, though we did found that the quality of those thermal pads wasn't as good as expected. During our tests we had to reattach them multiple times, finally using normal white goop because the heatsinks kept on loosing their grip on the memory heatsinks.



Access to the 1/2" fittings is limited with the MC8800 heatsinks installed:



We do think that for those memory chips, smaller heatsinks should have been used. During installation of our tubing we had to reposition the heatsinks a few times because we kept on touching them with the tubes. Another issue we had to deal with is the ability to install the G80 adapter kit without damaging the water block. The INBUS screws are a bit too close located to the top inlet connectors, blocking our INBUS screwdriver from being to do its job, as you can clearly see on the picture below:



It took us a bit longer before we could finally try out this block, though without the issue's we ran into above it shouldn't take more time then installing any other VGA cooler.

Let’s start the performance tests ->