PC water-cooling has been a pastime of mine for the last decade or so.
So you might wonder then, why it is that we hardly ever cover it on the channel anymore and the truth is that
low cost AIO liquid-coolers are more or less the same, to within a degree or two
and as for custom water cooling, well, it's expensive - making it niche
And quite frankly, there is not a lot of improvement left to make, so we're talking a degree or two-- if you're lucky.
We're talking a degree or two if you're lucky. It's mostly compatibility updates on both sides
but THAT is where everything changes today.
EK's new line of custom water-cooling parts promises the low cost of AIOs with the future upgradability
not to mention nearly all the performance of custom water-cooling.
But, can it hold up to all these claims?
*inhales*
Let's find out.
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I've said for a while that water-cooling is more about fashion than
practicality these days and the funny thing about fashion is that it's cyclical.
And EK's Fluid Gaming kits are no exception here.
Their revolutionary feature, the fact that they're made exclusively out of aluminum was first popularized by Koolance over 10 years ago.
Now, the advantages of aluminum are several:
It's incredibly light,
it's fast and easy to machine, and perhaps most importantly it's
much less expensive than copper
So why did Koolance eventually abandon aluminum for copper?
Great question, and we'll get into that a bit later.
First let's take a look at the three kits it that EK is selling today.
each one of them includes an all-new aluminum CPU block called the Supremacy AX,
a PWM controlled pump, with an integrated tube reservoir
Already a big advantage over basic all-in-ones that don't include an easy way to top them up,
some basic tubing,
EK's well-regarded Vardar fans,
and EK's new aluminum compression fittings that they designed specifically for these kits.
where the kits differ from each other is in the radiator configurations, and the inclusion or absence of
a universal Pascal GPU block but again, we'll touch a bit more on that later.
Assembly was easier than you'd probably think.
Yeah, it's more time consuming than installing an AIO
But it also shouldn't take longer than about an hour for the non GPU kits
Plus 30 to 45 minutes for each video card you add.
And during the process we found both, things we appreciated:
compression fittings are so much nicer than janky integrated barbs that make the components hard to reuse.
And, things that we didn't:
this tubing was a definite cost-saving measure,
which, aside from requiring us to lube it up with warm water and push a little harder than we'd like
Also required us to carefully plan our loop to avoid any excess, uh, kinkiness
On the subject of planning, if you spring for the A240G be sure to check the fine print.
its block is universal
as long as you're running a GTX 1060, or up and you also happen to have
a Founder's Edition version of your card. (or have a card with a similar block design)
So AMD users and last generation NVIDIA users need not apply
but we can live with all the compromises if fluid gaming lives up to EK's promises
So for our test, we used EK's new kits,
popular AIOs from Corsair,
and custom copper components from EK's own lineup on one of our Asus X99 test benches
with a Core i7 5960X
and NVIDIA's Titan XP.
Then, to eliminate variables to the greatest degree possible-
we used EK's Vardar fans running at max speed and a thousand RPM.
A setting that we determined to be a good balance between performance and noise in the Fractal Design Define R5
And results are mostly as expected which is a good thing.
With the A120 and the Copper 120 setup trading blows while the H60 lags slightly behind.
Moving on, the A240 looks like a much more compelling value than its little brother
For a very small price bump you get a radiator. That's twice the size
And another fan, which considering its retail value of 18 bucks means based on these performance numbers
you're getting a lot more bang for your buck
Last up to the plate is the A240G
It's kind of like the rich uncle of the A240 like you've actually
Like, he's not much better cooling-wise, but at least he has a boat. And by boat, I mean a GPU block.
Here, we got a little creative with our comparative testing, putting it up against a similar copper loop
and a dual AIO setup with NZXT's Kraken G12
Obviously that one isn't an ideal setup aesthetically
but it was the previous value full system water cooling king
AND, you can clearly see that that is no longer the case
So then EK's claims of better upgradability and better performance compared to AIOs seem to check out.
So what's the drawback?
Well that brings us to why Koolance discontinued their aluminum products.
If you mix these,
With copper products in the same loop it's possible, nay likely that you will experience
what's known in the biz as a really bad time.
or, Galvanic Corrosion
It can be so bad, and I don't personally trust any anti-corrosive additive that claims to prevent it,
that your block can be eaten away to the point where it can actually spring a leak.
So...
EK is taking a big risk here.
A risk that some user will combine their value aluminum line up with their premium copper line up
and possibly get gunk in their blocks, or at worst, bork his or her system, but
Seeing the performance and the price I don't blame them for trying and I have to give them credit for tackling this,
as safely as I think they could.
They're launching these parts exclusively in kits for now, rather than individually.
And, there are warning labels everywhere
So bottom line then, if you want to invest in custom water-cooling that you can reuse and upgrade down the line
But you want to save a few bucks, we really like this product as a whole.
Especially, the A240 and the A240G
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