Closer Examination

The CORSAIR design language is strong with this GPU block! The top is made of polished acrylic giving you a good look at the cooling engine below as well as the coolant passing through. Colored coolant would look right at home here even if CORSAIR would rather you use a clear coolant and the integrated RGB lighting instead. Another benefit of the see-through top is the ability to check for any stuck air bubbles and maneuver the system to wiggle it loose. On either side of the acrylic (PMMA) top is an aluminium cover plate which is shaped to look like a heatsink—pretty much form over function rather than any active cooling. A white CORSAIR sails logo in the bottom-right corner adds contrast to the black plate of this full-length, full-cover GPU block. There's GeForce RTX branding on the top left and a cutout at the top right for the power connector. Four BSP G1/4" threaded ports are part of an acrylic extension that makes up the I/O terminal which closely resembles the new Dominator Platinum RGB RAM sticks in design. There is another CORSAIR logo here and seen above is how the provided stop plug and tool go into place. The acetal stop plugs are adequate functionally even if they do seem like a cost-savings measure compared to the usual brass plugs.


Turning the block around, we see CORSAIR continue to be user-friendly with pre-applied thermal pads on the cold plate. There are plastic protective films you have to peel off the various pads but otherwise this is so useful compared to some GPU block manufacturers which don't even pre-cut the pads these days. In addition, there is also pre-applied thermal paste where the cold plate contacts the GPU core itself and here we get a hard plastic cover so the paste does not get smeared accidentally. The aluminium cover plates extend past the cold plate, and we see two cables affixed to a flexible PCB that is at the bottom of the acrylic top for integrated lighting. The cables are black and employ flat, ribbon-style wiring with a 3-pin connector CORSAIR has been using for a while now, and it goes to a compatible CORSAIR lighting controller to be used with iCUE. You can also use the provided adapter cable for more traditional 3-pin motherboard LED control instead. The other cable is for pass-through lighting, so you can use a single LED header for this GPU block as well as a CORSAIR CPU block, for example. At this point, I wiped off the pre-applied paste since I use my own and noticed decent machining, albeit not an especially polished cold plate.


There is not much else to see here, especially as the flow indicator present on the first few CORSAIR GPU blocks is not included anymore. The cooling engine still uses a series flow pathway as before, with the coolant going in the block in either direction to cool the VRAM/VRMs before moving onto the core and the rest of the components before exiting. This means the GPU core does not make direct contact with the coolest-possible liquid as far as it relates to the GPU block, but in practice, the coolant flows through the entire loop fast enough to stay at a fairly steady temperature. Further disassembly was done after testing was completed and here we can simply unscrew and remove the GPU core section which is a CNC-cut microfin piece that can be manufactured separately. This is not the most elegant of approaches, nor is it necessarily leading to the best-performing layout, but it is a pretty good solution for manufacturing the volumes CORSAIR deals with in comparison to the average water-block manufacturer that uses a CNC machine to churn out fewer blocks in a unit of time. There are over 50 microfins here—I counted 53—and CORSAIR doesn't specify the fin thickness/height or the microchannel width here. I did measure this specific piece to be 1.4 mm thick and the fins occupied an area of 26.6 x 18.4 mm while also being ~2.8 mm tall. Overall this doesn't seem to be the most restrictive cooling engine I've examined in this roundup.