Closer Look:

When a company is somewhat new to the liquid cooling world, it isn't unusual to find some sort of imperfection or odd choice in designs. If you recall the earliest water blocks, they were the talk of the town and a whole new concept that captivated the imaginations of the technically insane. However, even then the blocks weren't all that attractive and tended to bronze over a bit after a year or so of use. Even though D-Tek has only been designing and manufacturing a short time, you wouldn't think so by the appearance of their two Fuzion and Fuzion GFX water blocks. Packaging isn't everything, but it definitely counts when trying to catch the eye of potential users.

Boxes

Fuzion Contents

GFX Contents

As with all of the D-Tek product lines, the CPU and VGA cooling blocks have been changed as well as updated to better cool the latest multi-core processors. The Fuzion has a mostly jet black appearance thanks to the housing made of Delrin. Delrin is a light weight acetal resin created by Dupont used in place of metals in certain applications and can resist temperatures up to 90 C (200 F). There are benefits to using it in the Fuzion, especially where weight is concerned. Many CPU coolers are made of solid aluminum these days and these aren't very friendly to bare processors without the aluminum IHS. Delrin also resists common wear and tear that metals may develop. To combat this, D-Tek uses a specialized process to for lapping the copper base.

Fuzion Front

The Fuzion supports all current processors for both AMD and Intel. There isn't any known issue that I could find which includes incompatibilities with all current motherboards. This falls in line with the simplified process of designing their CPU cooler to work fully across the entire line. The included mounting components are all chrome plated and well machined. It's really nice to see such attention to detail carried over in to the smallest of components. The directions are pretty simple to understand and the mounting components look pretty easy to use.

Top

Side

Smooth Base

The copper base on this sample is very, very smooth but not quite mirror quality. It really doesn't matter how well polished a cooling block's base is as much as how well lapped it is. The smoother the surface, the more contact it makes with the processor which transfers heat better. A rough copper base can affect thermal conductivity simply because the grooves cause too little a surface area contact. These kinds of blocks require much more thermal paste than smoother blocks. In this particular case, there won't be any performance loss. And the extra polished blocks mainly look good to the buyer and onlookers.

Fuzion GFX Front

Moving on to the Fuzion GFX, much of the design follows suit with the use of black Delrin and chrome mounting components. If you take a look at the top of the block, you'll notice that D-Tek gave it a small acrylic window to not only dress it up, but to give it something unique and new over current blocks. If you like to use UV dyes to present your cooling system, then this should really add something to the GFX block that isn't commonly seen. The copper base is again, very well lapped so that it's really smooth. The big difference is that this isn't just the VGA block, but the GFX Uni-Sink Combo. So, mounting is a little more involved.

Delrin Design

Chrome Plated

Smooth Base

The Uni-Sink Combo consists of the block and a huge, black smooth heat sink designed to completely cover the entire Geforce 8800 GTX graphics card. It also works in unison with GFX block to cool the graphics card memory. Since installing the GFX block requires removing the entire 8800 GTX heat sink, you will need the Uni-Sink to replace it. The memory modules on the GTX cards can get really hot which if unchecked can cause a whole lot of instability issues.

Uni-Sink Layout

The top of the heat sink stands roughly 2 inches tall and is made of black aluminum. Looking at the bottom of the sink, you can see the brown thermal pads which come protected by a thin plastic tape. Thermal tape or pads has done pretty well for motherboard companies who use them on their chipset heat sinks, such as Abit. Graphics processors tend to get much, much warmer these days which will make it more interesting to see how well the heat sink will cool the memory modules. The entire heat sink is very light which is absolutely welcomed as some of these cards are very heavy.

GFX Added

Tall Heat Sink

Thermal Pads

Included with the blocks are all of the extras like the different sized nickel barbs. I like how nicely made the barbs are which reflects further attention to detail. There are two different sizes of hose barbs included measuring 3/8 and 1/2 which would work with anyone using 3/8 or 1/2 I.D. (internal dimension) tubing. Quite a few different water cooling kits use these two sizes nowadays. Your current installed system using either sized tubing would only need to have the water blocks swapped out. It's nice to see all the water cooling kit makers play well together and use similar sized products across the spectrum.

GFX 3/8 & 1/2" Barbs

3/8" Barbs

1/2" Barbs

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