 Now this is an unboxing of something that I'm very excited about. I haven't bought myself any cool new toys that are this cool in quite a while. So I'm going to be doing a small upgrade on my machine. I'm not going to be changing my graphics card. I'm sticking with my GTX 480. I'm actually going to be downgrading my RAM because right now I have 24 gigs on an MSI Big Bang X power with a Core i7-980X. So I'm going to be taking out two DIMMs and going with a quad channel 16 gig setup with a new 2011 processor. So I figured hey if I'm going to go 2011 maybe it's time to upgrade the old water block. Oh, Swift Tech released the coolest water block ever. So today I will be unboxing the Swift Tech Apogee HD limited edition 24k gold plated water block. These are individually numbered and very limited edition. They only produced a few hundred of them. That's apparently my number. So let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. So here's the CPU it's going to be working on. So it comes with first and foremost an installation guide which is by the appearances. Okay, in color sort of. Certain parts are in color so they show you how to put the thing on the thing and line it up with the other thing and put the goop on the other thing. Okay, next we've got a backplate of some sort. So this might be 2011 it might be 1366 not 100% sure what it is. Oh yeah mounting hardware that's included here. This is a good way to know for sure. So it includes 1155 and 56 1366 and 2011. You can request free upon demand 775 and AMD hold down plate and hardware for any of their given sockets. So there you go. So it only includes sort of the more modern Intel sockets. Okay here we've got the just general general. Oh no this is the 2011 kit. Okay so cool. So what's in here? So we've got four big thumb hold down screws. I'm going to put these on here so you guys can see them a little bit better. Swift Tech does such a good job of their mounting hardware. They're true pioneers when it comes to mounting hardware. And hold on I'm just going to make sure I don't lose these washers. So there's a couple washers here to hold them in place. I really hope I haven't lost one although it would appear that I may have. Whatever I'll find it. I'll find it. Oh there it is. Okay good. Okay so I've got four of those. I've got four of those. Really sharp. Just nice big thumb screws and then there's Phillips heads on the inside if you do want to do that. These springs. So this is one of the things that Swift Tech is so good at. They designed their mounting hardware to apply the exact right amount of pressure. No more no less. And they were one of the first ones to well not really one of the first ones but they're one of the only ones in the water cooling space that really pay attention to the actual spec for a given socket and then adhere to it. And then we've got a couple of clamps. So those are your worm drive clamps for your barbs. So you want to go ahead and use a slot screw driver to tighten those up. I don't like these. I prefer compression fittings. These are the compressions I'll be using with this block. We've got some included thermal goop. Some PK1. Really? They're using, they're bundling ProLinotech thermal goop. Fascinating. PK1 as far as my understanding goes is basically pretty much the same thing as MX1 although I could be wrong about that. Either way I've heard that PK1 is very good. I mean if they're going to compare it to MX1 then yeah it's pretty good anyway. So here we go. Socket 2011 installation kit. How to use. So you take off these, you put on those, you follow the instructions and nobody gets hurt. Okay. Now let's get to the water block itself which, hold on, need some unveiling here. Need like drum roll. Yes! That's right. Dead sexy gold plated water block that I saw and simply had to have. There's a limited edition with the engraved number on it. So like I said they only did a few hundred of these so I and one of my co-workers actually bought two of the first three that NCIX has sold. One guy pre-ordered it so he got one right away and then when they arrived in the warehouse this afternoon I ordered one up and I went down and I grabbed one because yeah these are like for sure the shizzle. So in terms of mounting options the Apogee HD actually has a couple of different choices so you can either use these guys as the inlet and the outlet or you can use these ones as the inlet and the outlet. I'll be using these two since I'll be using compression fittings. Here I'm just going to take one of my compression fittings out and I'll show you guys. I'll do a quick test fit here. Show you guys what it's going to look like with a big gold plated compression fitting. So these are bits power. Unfortunately Swift Tech includes gold plated barb fittings. I'm not much of a barb fitting guy. I really do prefer compression so I'm going to go ahead and replace these and wow those are on pretty tight. So you know what I'll be back in a sec. Sorry for the delay. So here's a trick that I use whenever I have delicate equipment is I'll take whatever tools I have and I'll put a cloth between them and what I'm applying them to. So here's the barb coming out of the block. You can actually here you can have a look at the socket there so you can see the gold plating goes all the way into the block itself and you can actually see the innards of the Apogee HD. So this is Swift Tech's latest generation highest performance to date water block. So let's go ahead and see how closely these gold platings match. The bits power one is a little bit more yellow but it should still look pretty tibling when I go ahead and throw that on there. There we go. So that should give you guys some idea how this is going to look once it's got a couple of compressions on it. So I wouldn't I'd be remiss if I didn't give you guys sort of the obligatory reflecting shot to show you what a mirror is here. You can see my cat in it. Hey Rumble! Come here. See? Can you see the cat? Look at that! That's a water block. Yeah, that's right. Okay so yeah there you guys. Here I'm actually just going to...fingerprints! Ahhh! When you buy something for the whole like and the whole point is that it's like super beautiful the last thing you want to do is cover it in ugly fingerprints and get scratches on it. So you can see the gold plating goes here and the copper base starts here and then there's the hold down which can be replaced so that's black. What I imagine someone will probably do is they'll buy this block. They'll strip the paint off the hold down and they'll get it gold plated too so the whole thing will just like look like ahh! Shining in gold and ridiculous but I think we're pretty much done here. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Apogee HD. So as I said before this is Swift Tech's new flagship block. This is a gold plated version of it so this is about as high performing and about as low flow because that's really what they've been focusing on achieving since way back in the storm days when the impingement blocks were cool and then after that they went to the Apogee so the pin matrix high flow low restrictions type design so we've got ahh! Yeah whatever I'm not going to say much more about it. Cool block, looks amazing. I am very much looking forward to getting it cooling. This CPU which will go here and will be cooled and it will be awesome and it will be gold and yeah. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. So my assistant here is giving me a hard time and as some of you may or may not know I use blue tubing in my system and the comment was oh that's not going to look good with blue tubing and I said well are you sure because personally I think it's going to look great with blue tubing. So I'll let you guys be the judge. Does it look good with blue tubing? You tell me.