Corsair Hydro X Series iCUE LINK XG7 RGB 40-Series, RTX 4080 Strix/TUF

When I went about doing a big GPU block roundup, I knew I had to prepare for a few sticker shocks with many blocks increasing in cost owing to the rising material cost over the last couple of years, especially for copper and aluminium. The average GPU block last gen was in the $150+ range without a back plate included. Now we are seeing them in the $250+ range with a back plate included. It's hard to swallow when CPU blocks are somehow still available in the <$100 range. CPU and GPU blocks also go through iterative designs in that the cooling engine and the aesthetics package around only changes drastically every few years, with most brands opting to only have small changes here and there for socket/PCB compatibility. As such, we have here some new gen block designs and some pre-existing ones. CORSAIR hasn't really changed things much in the GPU block realm and yet prices have consistently gone up. It asked $140 for the equivalent block and backplate with the debuting GTX 1080 cooling solution which went up to $150 with the next version for the RTX 2080, $170 with the same for the RTX 3080 reference PCB, and now $200 for the RTX 4080/4090 FE PCB. This aftermarket PCB block had an MSRP of $225 but is currently reduced to $205, still a big increase considering we no longer get thermal pads on the back plate.