Installation

If you followed the manual, you would have measured, cut, and placed the thermal pads on the cold plate itself rather than the PCB. Either works fine, but I found it easier to place them on the PCB as you measure and and cut them right before. Regardless of which way you go, be sure to take the plastic covers off both sides of the thermal pads before placing them. Koolance covers a lot of components here, including the inductors and memory VRAM, but there is also plenty of thermal pad material provided, and to where you need not worry if you mistakenly cut too short a strip. Be sure to apply pads of the correct thickness to the respective locations. Once done, put some thermal paste over the GPU core.

Now, carefully flip the assembly over and place it on a box such that the I/O plate of the PCB extends past the box, allowing the rest to lay flat. Use the provided screws, washers, and nuts to install the block and also secure the I/O plate to the PCB (the shorter nature of the block makes this easier even later in the process), which is a detail more than one of Koolance's competitors has forgotten about or not bothered to cater to. The block is now functionally installed and ready to be included in a watercooling loop.


Note also that the EVGA ACX backplate, part of the GPU I used for testing, is fully compatible with the Koolance VID-NX1080 water block, so you can get away with this backplate if you have the same GPU. Should you be going with the Koolance backplate, start by placing the provided thermal pads over the two sets of ICs by the core and the VRM section on the back, to then place washers over the appropriate holes, noting that you may have to remove some of the screws/washers that were already in use before. Once done, align the backplate on top and carefully install it using the longer screws, making sure the washers have not moved. This is the trickiest part of the installation process, but going one screw at a time and checking from the side continually will help a lot. There are a few extra screws here for the cutouts at the end of the PCB, which the block did not use by itself. As a result, there is uniform mounting pressure throughout the whole length of the PCB, and the backplate helps out here as well.


Removing the backplate and water block, we see excellent contact everywhere, including the thermal pads not shown for this demo. Installation was mostly straightforward thus, although I would have still preferred pre-cut pads, which would have made installation easier overall.

Overall, I do wish more companies would go the EVGA route and have pre-applied thermal pads to simplify the process further. At the very least, marking or having pre-cut the thermal pads would have helped, too, since there are so many components that need to be covered. As mentioned before, this is an area where Koolance would do better to improve.