[section_title title=”Assembly”]
Assembly
The first thing I needed to do was disassemble my 980 Ti, removing the air cooler which is connected by four screws. There are two cables connecting the fan / heatsink section to the card, one for fan control and the other for the LEDs so these need to be detached.
The back plate and remaining heatsinks that are covering the RAM and VRM modules also need to be removed. With those off, I was prepared to fit the heatsinks to the VRM chips, however, as I have a non-reference cooler I came across a problem…
The Accelero Hybrid III provided by Arctic for the review was specifically designed for the 980 Ti reference model, and unfortunately, the layout of capacitors etc was different on my GPU and so the Arctic VRM heatsink wouldn’t fit.
I was left with no other option but to fit the original heatsinks and back plate to the graphics card, however, I managed to attach the 80mm fan which allowed at least some of the expected air cooling that is part of this hybrid unit. A somewhat poor workaround that could probably have been resolved if I had known in advance since among the different model packs is a generic one that I could have probably used instead.
Fitting the AIO section however was a completely painless process, although with the original back plate in situ it was not necessary to include Arctic’s heatsink on the back of the board. So all in all, I only ended up using the AIO section and the 80mm fan from this hybrid kit. Power is provided to both fans through the GPU header, a splitter is on the 80mm fan that connects the 140mm fan to the card as well. Power to the pump is given through a MOLEX plug.
