So, I FINALLY won the battle with my new 680GTX and made my water block fit today. It didn't go as easy as I could have hoped. Had to do some modifications of the card to get the water block to fit.

Pulled the 480GTX:

Had to pull out all my bags of tricks:

I thought these tabs were the only thing in the way. Ground them down:

Installed everything. Looked and felt like everything was making contact:

This wasn't the case. It must have had just a tiny gap. My temps were just about the same as on air. In other words. Complete failure.

Back to the Dremel board:

With a little, lot? more modification I made some clearance:

This time I was confident that it was making full contact. Here she is installed and looking pretty:

33 Degree Celsius Idle and 53 Degree Celsius Load with a 200Mhz over clock confirmed everything was finally seated properly. Woohoo!

Nice. Water cooling huh?

I don't have a need for the Graphics card, but if I run across anyone who is looking to upgrade in the next few days I can let you know.

Ran some real tests. Just did a 100Mhz overclock on Core and Memory. Stable at that and temps are good.

I've been chatting with Dat and may be buying the old card off of him. Starting my new job, it's a matter of get that now to replace/upgrade my current one (and it would be a noticeable upgrade), or wait and just get a new 680 like Dat. Either way I can always get a more powerful card later on. Not really enough room for dual GPU in my system, unless I got a new mobo and possibly tower.

Of course I would side with slightly less performance for less than half price. lol.

Sadly, this new gpu has me testing things again and for some reason my CPU over clock is unstable. So I'm currently re running all the tests and tweaking voltages.

Looks awesome Dat. It's crazy how much work people go through to get MOAR POWER!!!

Thanks. Took me most of the night, but I finally got my CPU stable again. Had to up the voltage a bit, but the temps are still acceptable.

Very nice. Those tests look well within reasonable range for the hardware. What are you using to benchmark?

http://www.ocbase.com/

Free and tests CPU and gpu. Plus makes slick graphs.