The debate about the need for liquid cooling in a regular gaming PC has been raging for years. But since there is demand, there will be supply, so component manufacturers began to think about where else to slap dropsy besides the processor. The most obvious candidate was the graphics card.

In the case of the MSI Sea Hawk line, the design of the water block may differ from model to model, but in general terms everything is the same. A massive copper radiator is adjacent to the video core cover and memory chips, a reservoir with a special liquid and a pump are installed on top of it. The pump drives this liquid into the radiator, which is blown by the forces of one or more TORX turntables. In powerful cards like GeForce 2080 or 3080, the board components are additionally cooled by an axial or centrifugal cooler.


Many representatives of the Sea Hawk series are friends with the proprietary MSI Zero Frozr development, which allows you to switch the accelerator to passive mode when idle. In this mode, the fans stop completely, but the pump does not stop. As for the design of the dropsy itself, MSI usually gives its development to experienced contractors like the Slovenes EKWB or the Danes Asetek, who specialize in the design of industrial LSS. Such complexities are necessary so that the entire system does not fail under extreme overclocking conditions. Still, video cards of this level are rarely bought just to play.

Throughout the year, the most popular representatives of the Sea Hawk series were the RTX 2080 with a full coverage water block and the RTX 2080 SUPER Sea Hawk X with a hybrid dropsy. In 2021, MSI showed the next shift, which included Sea Hawk cards based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, but due to the shortage of components, their release was very late.