Sapphire R9 270X Toxic Vs NZXT Kraken Cooling Review

Installation

The card I’m working on today is this glorious looking Sapphire R9 270X Toxic. Here you can see what the GPU looks like with the stock cooler installed.

Here is the back-plate of the GPU.

Uninstalling the stock cooler on the Sapphire card was incredibly easy, just remove the four screws surrounding the GPU and one screw on the back plate and it pulls right off. It was simply a case of putting the back plate from the NZXT bracket under the card and passing the four mounting screws through; so far the whole installation process has taken no more than five minutes.

This next step, which I would have loved to have photographed in great detail, was a absolute nightmare. Putting the bracket over the GPU while holding the water cooling pump in place and trying to screw it to the four mounting screws (which you can see in the picture above) is a job that needs three hands. This is where you suddenly realise this is still a very technical job and personally I feel the risk of damaging the card was pretty high at this point; if you’re not confident with this kind of technology, this is the part that will really have you sweating.

The screws barely had enough thread on them to get the thumb screw caps on, it was incredibly tricky and I think NZXT need to provide longer screws in future to save on some of the headache, as well as retention clips to hold them to the PCB while you’re working with the pump and bracket.

Here you can see I finally got the bracket to hold the cooler in place; it took a lot of effort, but the end result does look very good.

Once installed on the motherboard you can see that the card still only takes up two bays, so CrossFire or SLI configurations are not going to be an issue.

Here you can see the back plate of the NZXT mount.