Board and Cooling Hardware
Being a final engineering sample, the waterblock for the BlackPearl isn't actually black! Instead, it's the silver-look block colour that you might have seen on Gainward CoolFX hardware in the past, such as this. Indeed, it's no coincidence that the BlackPearl uses an Innovatek-designed block similar to those Gainward have used in the past, since ex-Gainward employee Wolfram Tismer now works for EVGA in its new European office.
As you can see, there's the Innovatek block atop a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 board, EVGA marking it with a tag showing the 612/905 clocks they obtained on air. The block has an extension that cools some of the power regulation circuitry (fast-switching VRMs, mostly), as well as cooling the GPU and memory modules all resident on the front side of the board. The block uses the same mounting holes as the reference cooler does, making it easy for EVGA to mount the block during assembly.
Round the back you can see the rentention mechanism and the screws that hold the block to the front of the board. Since there's nothing to really cool on the back of the board, with all the memory modules on one side, there's no need for any back-side block of any kind. Barring the change of cooling hardware, it's a GTX 512, right down to the dual DVI ports (one of them dual-link), TV output (support component output for HDTVs) and PCI Express slot and power connectors.
Cooling Hardware
The sample came with all the auxiliary parts needed to create a cooling loop for the waterblock. There's tubing, water additive, reservoir and Eheim pump, radiator and a really quiet fan, and additionally, EVGA supply you with a number of additional barbs for the block, pump/reservoir and radiator. Those barbs come in both straight and right-angled flavours depending on how you need to setup the loop.
It's all screw-fit stuff and easy to assemble, and the tubing is pliable to make it easy to attach and create a kink-free loop. We'll cover everything in the full review. Performance sneak-peek next.
