X-Aqua GeForce 4 Waterblock

In the overclocker’s world, what was the cutting edge can quickly become mainstream. Heavily modded cases, rounded cables, water cooling and cold cathodes are more common now than ever before. Xoxide, a vendor that specializes in providing extreme cooling and case modding solutions, has developed their own line of waterblocks. Sold under the X-Aqua label, the line includes waterblocks for CPU's, motherboard chipsets, and video cards. Xoxide was kind enough to send us their new X-Aqua GF4 video card waterblock to try out.

If you watercool, the chances are good that you would eventually consider watercooling your video card. Even with the extra plumbing, this is not a bad idea. Particularly since some of the current video cards are very overclockable. Never having had much luck with overclocking video cards, I actually backed into watercooling video cards when I went to a new waterblock that used thinner tubing. I needed to relieve some back pressure in my system, so I decided to watercool my Voodoo 5. Doing so made my pump happy and my Voodoo hit speeds that it could not with air (which still wasn’t much to write home about). My dual waterblocks were homemade and the price was right.

Although I almost had tears in my eyes when I think of it, my trusty Voodoo 5 has long since left to warm the interior of someone else’s computer. Its replacement was a VisionTek GF4 Ti 4200. This is good for several reasons, including the fact that XOxide sent me a GF4 block.