Introduction

Anyone who has built a DIY watercooling loop in the last few years and done the typical multiple days of research to plan everything out would be aware of Bykski. The Chinese watercooling brand has made a strong name for itself in offering inexpensive products that have impressive build quality, aesthetics, and even performance. Indeed, we recently covered a Bykski CPU block which broke my value for money graph owing to how inexpensive it is compared to the others in the test suite. While this is great for the vast majority of end users, it must be acknowledged that most DIY watercooling in 2024 tends to be less for pure performance and more for aesthetics and fine-grained control over noise and temperatures, as well as simply wanting a cool project to do. Those who tend to waterblock their CPU and GPU also tend to have higher end components in the first place, meaning a reasonable section of the customer base is willing to splurge for more premium parts. Bykski does have some of these, as we will see at a later date, but the team behind the Bykski brand saw an opportunity to bring out a new brand—Granzon—focused primarily on premium and boutique watercooling parts as well as some cases to use said parts in.

Don’t ask me what Granzon stands for, as even the “About Us” page on the brand website is just full of random marketing lingo. What matters more is that today we will be reviewing the Granzon GAI0.1 CPU block, and once again I am left perplexed about how any of this helps with search engine optimization. Regardless, the GAI0.1 is an Intel platform block that comes in three options—a clear acrylic top with black mounting bracket, a clear acrylic top version with the mounting brackets now in a shiny silver finish, and a POM top version with the black mounting bracket. All three cost the same even though the first two have integrated RGB lighting and an additional adapter cable in the box—one more example of perplexing Bykski/Granzon decisions. The cooling engine is identical, and thus they should all perform the same too. This means that my review of the black POM top version will be fairly representative of all the Granzon GAI0.1 blocks, so let’s begin this review by taking a look at the product specifications in the table below. Thanks to Granzon for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp!

Specifications

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