GeForce GTX 480 liquid cooling Danger Den review

The Danger Den GTX480

So without much added technical info, we're diving straight into a photo-shoot where we'll guide you through the paces of installing the liquid-cooling block onto the GeForce GTX 480.

Mind you that you purchase just the cooling block, you'll need a full water-cooling loop of course; tubing, radiator, reservoir, pump, coolant and ADD this to your liquid cooling loop. When you purchase the block do not forget to order some fittings and clamps as well. Two of each ;)

The Danger Den GeForce GTX 480 liquid Cooling block.

So here we have the block. Heavy duty stuff really, completely made out of copper and it then got a nickel plating. An all-nickel plated cooling block will prevent corrosion in-between the aluminum heat spreader of the GPU and copper parts. There is a discussion that we know of that nickel plating would have an adverse impact on overall cooling performance, but really... it would be so little that you probably can't even measure it. As such, nickel plating for the win, we say.

The product comes with necessary screws, washers, one fine block, thermal paste (far too little of it btw) and a leaflet with some basic instructions. Fear not though, we'll explain it all as we guide you through the installation process...

Here we have the block itself, I really like the nickel plating TBH, looks far better than pure copper. The block provides full-coverage to the obverse side of the PCB, cooling all critical areas such as the GPU, the memory chips, and the important VRM area.

Designed for the GeForce GTX 480, it comes in three variants based on materials:

• All copper
• Nickel top and copper base,
• Nickel top and nickel-plated copper base.

As you can see, the top of the block has a nice mirror-finish.

The three models are selling at US $140-$170 range and are available from the Danger Den website. Now if you somehow see resemblances, correct... BFG has always used DD blocks for their products. Things are going really sour for BFG Technology though, do not expect them to release a GTX 480 with pre-fitted liquid cooling solution whatsoever, in fact I'm not even sure if BFG-Tech will last through this year as the economy hit them real hard.