Corsair Hydro Series HG10 N980 Edition Bracket for Reference Design Graphics Cards, GTX980, GTX980 Ti, and Titan

Hi everyone,For those of you who don't know yet, this cooling bracket was released several months ago before being quickly recalled due to bad hardware that caused the PCB of your graphics card to bend and make poor contact with your GPU. Corsair released this cooling bracket again now with shorter standoffs too correct the contact issue. I do see that there are reviews still stating bending and high Temps. All I can say for myself is that I purchased two of these for my evga gtx 980ti's. At first I had a very slight bend and Temps under load were 60-64C. I was not happy with this. I started some trial and error. I installed the HG10 N980 bracket to my PC while running Valley benchmark. I slowly released tension on one thumbsrew. One by one I basically got no bending of the PCB and now I got 98% GPU use & load Temps of 48C. What worked for me was loosening up the thumbsrew at the 11 o'clock and 5 o'clock position until I saen Temps dramatically drop. I am very happy that my 2 980ti cards are now running icy cold when paired up with 2, Corsair H75 AIO coolers. I will admit that I shouldn't have to do this "tinkering" around with this bracket as that's not what it's advertised to do. Anyone who had previously had issues really should give approach a shot. I'm a passed owner of an expensive custom water loop that ended up leaking one day & fried my $2000 gaming rig. I know that AIO's also run the potential of leaking, but I feel that your chances are much lower. Good luck everyone. Sorry for such a long review, but I hope that it can help someone out there...

So you want to cool your GPU easily and more cheaply than a full watercooling loop? Great! This is cheaper for sure. Somewhat easier I suppose.I bought this to cool my Titan X. The air cooled setup was sitting at 40C idle. Currently at 31C with a Corsair H60 cooler. I will post an update for temperatures under load later.Alrighty lets get to part everyone wants to know. How easy was this to install? Fairly easy to get the HG10 N980 onto the Titan after removing the air cool block. The hard part was getting the H60 radiator to fit in a good spot in my case. Because Corsair's hoses dont bend very well. Or at all really. Also you dont want a ton of pressure on the hoses because guess what? Theyre attached to a thousand dollar video card and you dont want to bend the card. Definitely glad I didnt buy a larger radiator such as an H100i or something. The hoses just arent that long and since the hoses dont face out like if you were cooling a CPU then you get to have some fun fitting everything without breaking stuff. But its all done now. Total time for installation was about 45 minutes or so. I took my time to take pictures and such though so if you know what youre doing you could probably be done faster.Things that you will most likely need/have to buy:1. A fan power splitter cable x2. I got lucky and had a few of these from other builds I've done. You need one for the fan and one for the pump on whatever cooler you end up buying.2. Small phillips screwdriver. To take off the air cooling block, install new block, ect.3.Thermal paste. This ones up to you. Corsair does pre-coat their cooling rigs but I like to do it myself just to make sure.4. Rubbing alcohol and Q tips. To clean off the old thermal paste on the GPU.Things to watch out for:1. Dont overtighten the screws holding the cooling bracket onto the video card. Good way to crack/bend the card.2. Make sure that you reattach the plate that holds the card to the case. You definitely need the support.Edit:So after playing some games I have some temps finally. Playing Skyrim for an hour never got over 40C. The big one was playing Elite Dangerous at 4k. With air cool I was hitting 80C+, now with this and and H60 im getting 44C after 2 hours of gaming. Much better. Still worried about all that weight on the card though. Really really wishing that EVGA included a backplate for the Titan X. I will be buying a backplate as soon as they are back in stock for more support and better cooling.

The cooler bracket is great for what it is, a way to add an Asetek cooler to an NVIDIA graphics card. Mine is on an EVGA GTX 1060 FTW, which required a slight amount of modification but is really simple and anyone with a hand file can achieve. Plus, the modification works for the 1070 and 1080 cards! Once the PWM fan cable was connected, and bracket fitted and installed, it worked great! I've got mine paired with an H80i v2, and while that cooler might not be ideal due to the hoses coming out the top of the pump and aren't really repositional to too much of a degree, it still fits and works fantastically! Hooked up to a USB header and recognised by the Link software and all is adjustable to the pump.The fan is controlled to a GPU monitoring system like EVGA Precision XOC or MSI Afterburner and works great at any speed, until it doesn't. The fan on mine started to malfunction about 4 months in and lost the ability to throttle down past 1400rpm. Corsair said it was probably the software, and EVGA said it was probably the cooler and suggested I swap the original air cooler back on. Uninstalled the HG10, put the air cooler back on and I have full control over the fan on that, so it was definitely the fan itself. Corsair's DNA process can be a bit "meh" so instead of waiting for them, I ordered a replacement fan in the way of of factory NVIDIA 1080 cooler fan, it's a 65mm fan vs. the 75mm fan that comes on this bracket, it's also a tad bit thicker and sits a tad closer to the card. Otherwise, the replacement fan is quieter at the same RPM as the corsair fan, and supposidly moves more air (I have no way of testing, I'm just going off spec sheet info)All in all, great bracket and would definitely recommend!

It took me 1.5 days to install onto my Zotac Titan x Maxwell GTX with Corsair H75 - Final installation 23 degrees down from 33 idle temp - 43 down from 83 degrees @ 100% load i would have given this 5/5 for the end result.quick note - I would advice against using a cooler requiring standoffs for ease of installationHowever the TiM on the H75 is insufficient i used ARCTIC MX-4 Thermal Compound Paste.You must use the AMD brackets to install this dont even bother with the Intel bracket during install, i had to off set the bracket by 1mm so it would not fall through the standoffs - (really pissed off with corsair about this) gently tighten screws just 1 90 degree twist after finger tightThe rest is simple installation of the card and H75 into your computer and running tests... then repeat if required i had to do this twice

what a waste of time. after going through corsairs tech spec list and finding my card on there, i was sure everything was going to be fine. it was not. my card, despite being on the list of cards that are supported, did not fit the adapter. built to a OK quality but not happy at all.

Nice bracket does the job keeps vrm cool aswell a bit of Messing around and bingo using corsair hydro liquid cooler and block nice temps r 48c /50c when pc is cool first tmroom temps of 22c and then 24c summertime 50c gpu temp max after 3 hours 4k titan fall 2 with extra 140mhz gpu clock good bracket takes some thinking

Unfortunately my ASUS ROG STRIX 980TI is too wide for this bracket.

I have got one for my gtx 980 and what I can say is that: it bended my graphics card therefore the contact between gpu and water cooler was not done properly, and the fan was so noisy, it did not go bellow 40% rmp, all these made me to uninstall this bracket. In conclusion for me is waste of money.