Intro
As a proud owner of the Rampage II Extreme (in my daily driver) I was looking forward to trying out the Rampage III Extreme, especially after a poor cold bug EVGA Classified E760. Anyhow, as some of you are well aware the R3E board temperatures get a little warm when you start to push clocks and voltages–oh come on I know you have put your hand on the stock cooling heatsink. I have been wanting to take a closer look at full board blocks for some time now and the Rampage III Extreme looked to be a good candidate, knowing several water block companies would be producing blocks. Asus was open to the idea and graciously provided us with a test board to beat on. But keep in mind, this is not a motherboard review–the merits of the excellent board are covered at length by nearly every hardware enthusiast site–but a look at water cooling the board and VRM’s and what is available on the market. However, I might throw in some comments about the board throughout the article here. Before moving to the blocks in our testing of the Rampage III Extreme, we just have to have a few shots of the main product here.
Asus must agree that the board temps do favor the warm side, they include a fan module that replaces the heatsink over the NorthBridge to provide a little extra cooling. For us water heads, that little fan module is the anti-christ, but alas, we’re on a mission to find the better alternative to that noisy fan module. Time to end the intro and distractions and get to the line-up.
The Round-up
Quite the motley crew and several different design approaches into cooling the board, with heat pipe hybrid to one piece and even two piece with a custom bridge. These design differences mostly impact installation and how many different spots you need to slap a thermal pad more than they do temperature wise.
Before we roll into the first looks I need to pull out the soap box a moment and address the opinions of cooling the board is useless or just for aesthetics… I have a completely different view. To be clear, the stock Asus heat sink showed no problem maintaining stability with the overclock settings we will use in testing, but that heat sink relies on air flow through the case in order to shed the heat. Sure, the heat sink will continue to capture the heat until saturation, but air flow is what moves the heat away from the heat sink and board. Removing the stock heat sink and replacing with a water block is about managing the heat. We spend a tremendous amount of time planning and figuring out how to cool our components with a dedicated cooling system, thermal management if you will which is focused at capturing and removing the heat where we want it. I do not want the heat just radiating in my cases, let my cooling system(s) deal with it. Board blocks are the next logical step after CPU and GPU cooling. Additionally, you also gain the advantage of lowering the operating temperatures of the chips, which will potentially lead to a longer life for your components. Okay, I have spent enough time on the soap box.
Bitspower AIX58NSE3
When you open the Bitspower box you are just overloaded with baggies full of bits, it is a little overwhelming. Wrapped up in those bags is the mounting hardware, mosfet backplate, replacement o-rings, thermal pads, and 1g of AS Matrix. But wait there is more, two matte black rotary elbows (green oring and all), tube bridge with connectors, instructions and a Bitspower case badge, yeah and the block too. See, overwhelming. Once you finally overcome the accessory overload the two-piece block catches your eye, and how that tube bridge comes into play. Listed dimensions for the Mosfet block are 155x38x15.7mm with the NB/SB (actually, IOH/ICH) block measuring in at 151×147.5×15.5 (LxWxH). Yes, the IOH/ICH piece is pretty massive and contacts ten different chips besides the IOH/ICH chips. The mosfet block is more the norm, covering just the two VRM locations.
No picture of the Bitspower block all tubed with the trick connector just yet, you will get your view of that later in the article. On that connector, the two closest barb locations will be used, this ensures clearance for your CPU block of choice.
Danger Den CHP-100
Danger Den comes into the group here as probably the most unique approach, the block and heat-pipe hybrid. We have seen motherboard manufacturers release a similar approach, but Danger Den goes much further. With the DD block, only the SB (ICH) relies on a heat pipe for capturing the heat and moving it back to the water portion covering the NB (IOH) and VRM’s. Additionally, the Danger Den block is primarily Delrin with working copper only on the contact points of the board, which greatly reduces the weight of the block. The question looming in your mind as to how this impacts cooling ability will be answered later, but in testing the reduced weight was nice when going through the mount process four times.
Sticking with the uniqueness, Danger Den is the only one of the group here to scrap the stock ROG badge location and integrate and LED into the block, which illuminates the ROG text over the mosfets. In testing and photos, I did not bother moving the ROG badge so you will have to use your imagination. Plus, I am not sure how many folks actually reuse the badge anyhow.
EK FB-RE3 Nickel
With the introduction of X58 brought the Full Board block approach versus the former where individual blocks were required for the mosfets, NB and SB. EK was one of the companies to make all the individual blocks, this meant a lot of confusion for us in trying to outfit our boards, and do not forget about those tricky tube runs. This is where the full board blocks have really simplified getting your board wet.
With my little full board/individual block editorial out of the way, the EK Rampage III Extreme block is not one continuous piece of copper, but two with a water channel integrated in between the VRM’s and IOH/ICH sections. The red piece of acrylic makes up the bridge portion, while EK leaves some room for the ROG badge as well. Your barb ports on the EK block are above the mosfets near the EPS 8-pin and over the IOH, water does flow over the ICH as well. In fact, the water channel is quite lengthy overall providing quite a bit of surface area for heat transfer. We will see later on how well all this surface does for cooling performance.
Koolance MB-ASR3E
Since you have already read the little full board editorial, I will spare you covering that again. However, Koolance is another company that produced individual blocks and tried the balance the universal and board specific blocks in their product line-up. Thanks once again to X58 and the full board blocks, Koolance has simplified their line-up and produces board blocks for specific motherboards while still keeping some universal blocks available for those boards where full board is not possible or the board is not popular enough for a FB to be produced.
The Koolance design for the Rampage III Extreme contains three separate copper blocks linked together with a Delrin water channel. Speaking of the Delrin water channel, the Koolance design is a multi-layered approach, with the copper being the first layer, a polished stainless steel cover and the Delrin water channel sandwiched in the middle. The spot for the ROG badge is present on the block as well, but I am still puzzled as to how the LED wires from the badge would snake through the block and connect up to the board or maybe it does not snake through the block at all. Barb port wise, you have a port up at the EPS 8-pin, but your other port is down below the ICH. One of the photos above shows the slot compatibility with the barb port locations being way down there. With the second barb port being that low on the board, this may simplify the tube routing in your case, something to ponder before forming your opinion on the location of that barb port.
Internals
You have probably noticed there are no internal shots thus far. The reasoning here is that I was not about to take apart the blocks before completing testing, the reassembly process is a laborious one and I did not want to cause any extra headaches for myself through testing. With that said, testing is complete, so let’s take a closer look at just the internals. However, Danger Den’s block is permanently sealed and my only means of getting a look at the internals is a Dremel or a Solidworks drawing… so please accept the Solidworks image from Danger Den since I just could not bring myself to sacrifice a block for one photo.
For the most part, the blocks all take a similar approach putting a flat surface over the VRM and then active cooling over the IOH. The group is then split when it comes to the ICH with Bitspower and Koolance putting active cooling over the chip. While EK goes similar to the mosfets with a flat surface and Danger Den breaking the norm and running a heat pipe from the IOH down to ICH. I give credit to Danger Den for stepping outside of the typical box, but we will have to wait until the thermal results to see if the praise is short lived. You may notice the water still on the blocks, they did not have much time to sit and dry after pressure drop testing and once I saw the photos I thought it added a little something to the photos. In addition, the Koolance and Bitspower blocks show some crazy colors in the water path, the photo editing made that much more visible than it actually was, even still it is nothing to be concerned with.
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Emily Carter is a tech enthusiast who writes about PC cooling, hardware performance, and system optimization. She enjoys simplifying complex topics and helping readers make better tech decisions.
