Hi everyone,
upon searching up and down on the web trying to find out whether eVGA CLCs and NZXt Kraken G12 GPU brackets were compatible, I was amazed by the lack of information. I was not able to find a solid answer.
Well, here's my contribution then. Figured the best place to inform of my findings is the eVGA forums. I decided to go ahead and wing it, as I had a 240 CLC being used by my CPU, and a G12 coming in. Installed it onto an eVGA GTX 1080 Classified:
So, it does fit, but there are some things that must be noted.
1. It has to go installed in that skewed fashion for nvidia cards. Otherwise the casing will interfere with the mounting holes.
2. It will not fit AMD cards. Skewed or not, the casing is set over the mounting holes for AMD cards in a way where the thumbscrews will not go in. Using equally long and threaded screws over the thumbscrews the G12 comes with may be possible, but entails some risk of crushing the die if not careful.
3. Nn evga cards, and likely others, unless you use a copper shim or dremel the screw point "arms" around the die on the baseplate, the waterblock will not make contact with the die. I initially used a 20x20x1.2mm copper shim, and worked. After placing the Thermal Pad upgrade kit on the card, 1.2mm thickness would no longer do. I'm assuming the new, improved pads raised the baseplate just enough so that the die and waterblock wouldn't do optimal contact anymore. So, 1.2mm thickness shim for unmodified cards, 1.4-1.6mm shims for modified.
So there you go. Now we all know.
So you have a point of comparison, this was installed into a well ventilated mATX Fractal Design Define Mini C in a room with ambient of about 25C, the CPU now using an Arctic Frezer 33 eSports One heatsink (for $30, it's very good), and the GTX 1080 OCed to +100 Core, +500 Mem, is full loading at about 51C.
As you can tell, I really like eVGA and Arctic. Top-notch companies and products in their respective areas.
post edited by emertinsp201 - 2018/03/02 09:03:26