A GeForce RTX 4090 FE is not only expensive, but also still highly sought-after. The original air cooler is almost oversized and as a buyer you hardly have a valid reason to disassemble and rebuild this collector’s item. Well, almost, because the weight and space requirements of this card are the other side of the coin, although the board itself turns out to be quite small. Exactly at this point, however, such a card becomes really interesting for the water cooling fraction, especially since it is one of the somewhat cheaper specimens of this high-end family (assuming a bit of luck).

This is where the internally named Corsair CX-9020019-WW water block comes into play as the first of several ordered water blocks (so there will be follow-ups), which comes with self-confident prices starting at about 240 Euros. That’s not a small amount, and you have to be tough to add such a topping to a card that’s already very expensive. We’ll see later today that it’s worth it, of course for the customer and not only for Corsair. There is a three-year warranty anyway. Terminal Pcb

Let’s unpack the cooling block first and see what Corsair packs in and out of it. You get the fully assembled water block including acrylic cover and light metal cover, along with the terminal already screwed in place and the integrated ARGB LED light bar, plus a few other things.

The loose parts include two blind plugs, a tool for screwing in the plugs, a splot bezel (unfortunately dual-slot), a backplate, the necessary screws, an adapter for connecting to the motherboard’s digital ARGB, PreciDip header, 5V) and a short manual. With this, the story of the accessories is also already told, because everything that I have not yet mentioned, but is still needed, is already firmly stuck to the water block.

Unfortunately, the homepage hardly gives out any detailed information, so I will of course make up for and add to that in the course of this chapter with tape measure and scales. The entire cooler weighs 796 grams without the backplate and screws, but with the plugs. With the screws, it’s about 800 grams and with the backplate fully assembled, it’s 870 grams. However, that’s only about a third of the original air cooler. So it’s well worth it.

Since the PCB is nice and short by design, the water block mounted on the PCB, including the slot bracket, measures only 21 cm in length. The height of the water block is also moderate at around 12 cm and 14.5 cm including the terminal. The thickness including the backplate is less than 2 cm. Corsair does not specify the copper block itself, but it should be the usual nickel-plated electrolytic copper. The cover is made of acrylic glass, i.e. PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate). I’ll show you in a moment that there was some (legal) trickery with the thickness.

If you were wondering where all the things like thermal paste and thermal pads went when you looked at the accessories, the cooler is like a lazy housewife’s soup: Everything is already in there and you really can’t do anything wrong. The pre-assembled pads are already in the right places and the paste is also already applied and protected by a cover. That’s all you need to ensure successful assembly here.

However, the trick with the over 50 and really high cooling fins would not work in this form with a solid panel, unless you made it almost 1 cm thick, which is pointless. Expensive and extremely long processing time during removal. For this reason, a coldplate sealed with an additional O-ring and eight screws are used as a separate insert.

In the picture we can also see the O-ring and the positioning of the coldplate insert. You can do it that way as long as the results fit. So why not?

The backplate, on the other hand, is quasi purely optical and also serves as stabilization. I’ll go into more detail about the three small cooling pads during assembly, but that’s rather marginal. The supply line to the RGB stripe is long enough to be connected to the RGB header as well. Otherwise, the plug fits directly to the CORSAIR Commander PRO, Commander Core XT or Lighting Node PRO without adapter, of course. After all, there are 11 screws in total, 6 of which carry the backplate.

How the whole thing can be assembled now, you will see after the next page.

Pages: 1 - Introduction, technical data and details 2 - Disassembling and mounting 3 - Test system, measuring, infrared and conclusion

Fine, fine.I'm curious which heatsinks will be tested and how big the differences are.Even if that wouldn't change anything for me, because the Alphacool heatsink is already mounted on the Suprim X and it will stay there.:)

I have the EKWB FE cooler and I am not satisfied with it.Apparently, the cooling surface is not flat on the heatspreader, which can also be seen from the imprint.And I have a delta of about 35° under load (< 2-4° idle)

I have already dismantled the part and removed the pads for the coils in the hope that this will improve the contact pressure and thus the contact surface.Has brought a little something, before it was even worse.

I've now got super-soft pads that I could put on the accumulators, but to be honest I don't feel like dismantling the whole thing (including hard tubes etc.) at the moment.So it stays that way.It's not that you can't live with it, but it's annoying.

I'm curious to see what will come out of your test of the EKWB block.I'm surprised you don't already have it, because it was by far the first on the market.

The Corsair part isn't bad at all, and I like the fact that everything is prepared in advance.Unfortunately, the ARGB connections are of course again Corsair proprietary.

Unfortunately, AquaComputer takes its time and doesn't seem to want to offer a model for the FE again :(

That's not entirely true.I also complained during the last test and there is now an adapter to Preci Dip included, i.e. completely normal, digital 5V RGB.

I also.I already have the Alphacool here, EKWB wanted to send something, but they don't dare anymore.:D Aqua Computer will come later, Raijintek soon.Bykski don't do it and Barrow seems to be going down the drain as a company.

Thanks for testing!(y) I don't think the Kotzair cooler is that bad (I have it on a 2080), the Alphaccol cooler from the 3090FE looks a lot more playful (disco light).

Pity!Would have been exciting, especially what the cooler with an active backplate brings, or not!

View image at the forums

View image at the forums

Active backplate is pawn catch.That was only worthwhile with the 3090 FE equipped with RAM on both sides.Good for taking money out of customers' pockets, technically completely worthless.The thermal resistance of the board and pads alone completely negates any benefit.:D

I have the "Alphacool'ed" 4090 Frostbite - I'm very satisfied, even if I can't keep the < 40 degrees due to the lack of a chiller.I'm more like that at max 47 degrees in long-term gaming.

The only downside: mine has a stupid 3-slot aperture, although all the pictures show a 2-slot.But so far I was too lazy to write to Inno3D or Alphacool...

By the way, Bykski has a block: https://ezmodding.com/de/waterblocks/GPU/NVIDIA/N-RTX4090H-X

Write to EZmodding, they seem to be very community friendly!I would be very happy if you could see/read them here.

And then the Granzon please: https://ezmodding.com/de/waterblocks/GPU/NVIDIA/GBN-RTX4090FE

You don't really "need" the part, the 4090 is already completely relaxed from the start.My Strix and my brother's FE are really extremely quiet, hardly go over 60-65 degrees under load and, thanks to UV, can easily stay below 300 watts if you want.

Has really become a great card from Nvidia 🤘

Unfortunately, the Founders was out at the time, and unfortunately other complete Waku solutions as well.That's why I got the Bykski cooler on the 4090 Zotac OC after a 4-week wait, after all.Runs... If there were a 1-slot slot cover for such a solution somewhere, that would be really great.I never have enough free PCI/E slots, and tricking with the removed slot covers is just not that exciting.

At first I thought that there was hardly any reason for a block with the thick stock coolers, but was taught better.

The cards with the really quiet and good fans have coil whine and the cards with little coil whine have crappy fans.

With the ones with the bad fans, you just don't hear the coils :P

The problem: reference not equal to FE.Bykski doesn't do an FE block.I've already asked EZ

But had some 4090 there and there are some massive differences in coil whine.

Asus Tuf and Strix were really bad, that didn't work at all.MSI Suprim also had very loud coils, which I found a shame because otherwise it is a really nice and good card.Gigabyte Gaming OC was a good middle ground, coils were at least okay and the fans were a bit fast, but no weird background noise.KFA2, Gainward Phantom and Zotac Trinity were all about on par and comparatively quiet.Zotac AMP Extreme Airo had the same crappy fan as the Trinity (really annoying background noise), but the coils were the quietest.

It could be because of the larger voltage supply that the amp is quieter than the trinity.

Igor's article - Another nice breakfast accompaniment 😃😉 I only now learned that the 4090s are no longer equipped with RAM on both sides.Or does that only apply to the FE?

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Editor-in-chief and name-giver of igor'sLAB as the content successor of Tom's Hardware Germany, whose license was returned in June 2019 in order to better meet the qualitative demands of web content and challenges of new media such as YouTube with its own channel.

Computer nerd since 1983, audio freak since 1979 and pretty much open to anything with a plug or battery for over 50 years.

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