 Welcome to another unboxing on Ligus Tech Tips. This is the Alpha Cool NVXP NVIDIA GTX 670 stainless steel polished water block from Alpha Cool. Pretty much this is what we're planning to use on our BitFenix liquid cooled machine. So we're going to use a GTX 670 and this Alpha Cool block in order to achieve the cooling performance that we need in a small form factor liquid cooled machine. The thing about the 670 is it's such a low profile video card that it is perfect for a low profile liquid cooling installation. So you might have noticed that compared to my standard HTC 8X phone size comparison that I've never done before now or maybe once before now that this is not a huge water block. And the reason for that is the 670 appears to be a large graphics card at first but when you turn it around it actually has like an extension that's only made of plastic. I'll get Slick to come in and have a look at this for us. An extension that's only made of plastic that goes beyond the size of the PCB here. So this block is a perfectly appropriate size for this particular card. That makes sense to you. So why did we decide to go with this one? Well availability helps and Alpha Cool has been around a long time making water cooling gear so let's just go ahead and see if I can figure out how to like why do they do this? Look at this it comes in like a food package. See it's like vacuum sealed. Let's just slice that up. Okay yeah it's all good. I mean I think I can think of one reason it's going to prevent the copper from oxidizing if they have it sealed up like this because one of the things that drives me crazy about copper blocks is oxidized ugly stained copper so I'm going to be extremely careful not to oh that's going to be hard. Yep I have a solution. Gloves I love the look of copper I hate the look of stained oxidized ugly copper so we're going to go ahead and put on some gloves to handle this. I would highly recommend that you do the same thing. It's not because of any sort of fault in fact the more pure the copper being used by the manufacturer the better the chance that it will be easily stained and look horrific after a little while. So the top is a polished stainless steel although it's available in a variety of finishes so you can see how reflective that is. We're going to see if we can catch slick in the reflection. Diesel am I close? I got him. Oh wait wait go back. There we go that is how reflective the top of this block is. It's actually only a very very slim layer of stainless steel covering the top of the block and it's two separate pieces of copper here that make up the overall construction so you can also see they're using allen key screws to hold the whole thing together very very securely I mean these are pressure tested so yeah. Now this is a bit of a unique thing so they're actually using a little bit less material to make up the block itself here. It used to be that you'd see the threads themselves made out of whatever material the block is in this case copper but what they've done is they've actually expanded the area here by putting like a threaded piece through it so that's sort of a unique approach. It looks like it allows them to save on some of the cost of the block but it shouldn't affect performance and it shouldn't affect the ability of the block to accept larger threaded fittings so that was a big problem for a while is some fittings like the older D-Tech barbs had threads that were like this long and people were putting them through full cover blocks and they were going almost all the way through to where the other fitting would go in the other side and they were leaking because they weren't going in all the way so that's not going to be a problem with this. One thing to be careful of with these water blocks is you want to make sure that you have a reference card so here they're giving you a little guidance thing for making sure that your card is actually compatible with the block before you get started so you can see right here all the places where you need to apply thermal pads so here for memory and memory here for the GPU itself and here for the VRM and let's see what else we got here ah yes their whole copper theme thing that I think is freaking awesome so here's some more thermal compound that's going to be for the GPU core itself you won't use a thermal pad for that and then copper stoppers I would probably go ahead and use nickel plated stoppers just because that'll be more consistent with the overall look that I'm going for in my build but I think that pretty much covers it. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.