Swiftech introduced the limited edition Apogee SKF Heirloom Series CPU water blocks, which come in unique collectable colors, and which can be accessorized using mods and inserts. The block is predominantly made of copper with an anodized aluminium top, and comes in five color variants - Black Chrome, White Chrome, Solid Gold, Matte Gold, and Rose Gold. The top features an acrylic cutout over the block's main dissipation area. This is where an insert goes in; available in six colors. The Swiftech logo on the metallic portion of the top holds a second color insert, which comes in six colors. The retention bracket comes in two colors - black and chrome. Under the hood, the block features hundreds of 125 micron-thick copper fins for effective heat dissipation. Available now, the Apogee SKF Heirloom Series is priced at $94.95, and includes one choice of inserts, each. For $5 more, you can laser-engrave a phrase on the top.

Hold on to your ETH hats: you will still be able to cash in on the ETH mining craze for a while. However, you should look towards your 3 GB and 4 GB graphics cards with a slight distrust, for reasons that you should know, anyway, since you have surely studied your mining cryptocurrency of choice. Examples are the GTX 1060 3 GB, or one of those shiny new 4 GB RX 480 / RX 580 which are going at ridiculously premium prices right now. And as a side note, don't you love the mechanisms of pricing and demand?

The problem here stems from ETH's own design for its current PoW (Proof of Work) implementation (which is what allows you to mine the currency at all.) In a bid to make ETH mining unwieldy for the specialized silicon that brought Bitcoin difficulty through the roof, ETH implements a large size data set for your GPU to work with as you mine, which is stored in your GPU's memory (through the DAG, which stands for Directed Acyclic Graph). This is one of the essential differences between Bitcoin mining and Ethereum mining, in that Ethereum mining was designed to be memory-intensive, so as to prevent usage of ASICs and other specialized hardware. As a side-note, this also helps (at least theoretically) in ETH's decentralization, which Bitcoin sees more at risk because of the inherent centralization that results from the higher hardware costs associated with its mining.