After that little interlude with the MCW30, most of you are wondering where the co-star of today's show went, well here it is, the MCW60. Rather than jumping into the packaging of the block right away, we'd like to go over the features and similarities against those of the apogee. First and foremost, the blocks themselves are quite similar in size and height, even though the MCW60's threaded holes are placed at a 90 degree angle to the card, so that these blocks will fit on cards in SLI setups without a problem. Framing the smooth jet black top is a narrow chromed bracket, with a quadrant of holes in it's corners, allowing this block to be bolted down to just about any Nvidia 6 or 7 series cards. Users of 6600s can mount this block to their cards, but it's recommended that alternate mounting hardware is purchased, so the barbs face straight outward, as opposed to an angle. Slightly inland from these four outer holes are two larger ones, intended for bolting this block down on ATI hardware, as well as older Nvidia hardware. These holes on the side of the bracket extend down, forming themselves as semicircle cutouts on the sides of the block's base. As we turn the block over, the stepped base can be seen, which is implemented to facilitate properly cooling video cards with shims installed. Apart from this, the base looks alarmingly similar to that of the Apogee. So much so, that we were inclined to remove the four hex bolts up above to take a look inside? What did we find? Well, we'll tell you just what we found after the bundled goods have been looked at.
Above the MCW60 which you've already seen, there was a whole host of goods to be found. Tucked into the top of the box were:
- A well done instruction manual
- A full tube of Arctic Silver Ceramique
- Two sets of hose barbs (1/2" and 3/8". Europeans get 1/4" too)
- Two sets of click-clamps (1/2" and 3/8". Europeans get 1/4" too)
- A hex wrench for installing your (optional) 6600 hardware
- Custom Backplanes & Mounting Hardware for ATI/Nvidia
- The MCW60 Itself
- Eight MCW14 BGA ram sinks, as reviewed before.
As with the other two blocks looked at in this review, everything coming from the box was of good quality, and was designed to be installed and maintained as simply as possible. While a certain degree of fiddling is needed to get this block mounted, it's not altogether too hard to do, which is nice to see, as even experienced users can hate having to fumble with hardware to get it working. Once this was all unpacked, and the block's exterior examined, it was time to take a look inside of the MCW60. Now, Swiftech may have told us that this was based around the technology of the Apogee, but we just didn't expect them to be this similar. When the block was cracked open, we were left staring at an apogee with a stepped base and notches in its sides. No wonder this block was performing so dang well in preliminary testing. Looking to the lid, we can see the same widened nozzles as before, intended to allow coolant to pass across the entire surface, effectively chilling that entire toasty video card die. Seeing as how the block shares a design with a CPU water block, we expected very similar results to that of the Apogee, that is, with a few degrees of difference, as there will be reduced flow inside the water block.
