Closer Examination

The Bykski CPU-FIRE-ON-I water block is impressive in how big and solid it feels in the hand. It measures in at 100 x 98 x 24 mm, making it among the largest CPU blocks I have ever used. Bykski also manages to keep this from being just another giant slab in design with the PMMA top cover section having accents and angles resulting in an illusion of light and shadow even in this opaque black exterior. Incidentally, this has the mounting bracket as part of the top, and we see larger holes in the corners to help accommodate a wider variety of Intel CPU sockets. There is a polished clear acrylic central section affording a closer look at the cooling engine used here as well as the two BSP G1/4" ports spaced enough away from each other to accommodate typically used fittings—the bottom one would be the ideal inlet port. Then there's the small display with the Bykski logo on the bezel for branding, this will be useful for showing real time coolant temps as we will see soon. There are two cables coming out the side and both are thin ribbon-style in black for easier routing—one is an LED cable as seen in the previous Bykski block and the other goes to a full-size MOLEX connector for power to the display. A look from the side also shows off the various components that make up this block.


Turning the block around, we see a protective sticker placed over the nickel-plated copper cold plate. There is no pre-applied thermal paste as with the likes of Corsair, so I hope you already have a tube of your preferred TIM lying around. The cold plate is massive and has a slight convex shape to it which flattens out during installation, courtesy applied pressure at the corners. It is machined well although not polished as with a few other blocks we have seen before—this does not matter for the actual performance of the block.


Disassembly was done after testing was completed and here we can simply unscrew the six socket head 2.5 mm screws securing the cold plate—keep in mind that two of them have tell-tale stickers on top which will show you have disassembled the block, and doing so may end up voiding warranty. The two main parts of the block—the acrylic top with the integrated mounting bracket and the cold plate—are now fully separated for closer examination. We can also now remove the triangular jetplate which has a similarly shaped O-ring underneath, in addition to a larger one around the entire cooling engine to ensure the coolant flows only where it should. The stainless steel jetplate is 0.5 mm thick and the cold plate itself is thicker than average at 5.5 mm in the middle and 2.5 mm outside. The fins are ~3 mm tall, occupy an area of 38 x 34.9 mm, and are 220 µm thick with a 200 µm spacing between them for the coolant to flow through the microchannels. This is a step up from the previous Bykski block in terms of the fins now occupying more space to slightly increase the active heat transfer surface area, but the cooling engine itself is relatively simple compared to some of the competition today.