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PC water cooling has been a pastime of mine for the last decade or so so you

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might wonder then why it is that we hardly ever cover it on the channel

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anymore and the truth is that lowcost AI

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liquid coolers are more or less the same

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to within a degree or two and as for

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custom water cooling well it's expensive making it Niche and quite frankly

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there's not a lot of improvement left to make so again we're talking a degree or

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two if you're lucky it's mostly compatibility updates on both sides but

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that is where everything changes today

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ek's new line of custom water cooling parts promises the low cost of aios with

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the future upgradeability not to mention nearly all the performance of custom

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water cooling but can it hold up to all

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these claims let's find

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out LTX the first Meetup we've done in

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over two years go check it out only like

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800 tickets

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remaining I've said for a while that water cooling is more about fashion than

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practical ality these days and the funny thing about fashion is that it's uh

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cyclical and ek's fluid gaming kits are

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no exception here their revolutionary

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feature the fact that they're made exclusively out of aluminum was first

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popularized by coolants over 10 years

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ago now the advantages of aluminum are

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several it's incredibly light it's fast

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and easy to machine and perhaps most

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importantly it's much less expensive than copper so why did coolant

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eventually abandon aluminum for copper

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great question and we'll get into that a bit later first let's take a look at the

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three kits that EK is selling today each

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one of them includes an allnew aluminum CPU block called the supremacy ax a pwm

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controlled pump with an integrated tube Reservoir already big advantage over

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basic all-in ones that don't include an easy way to top them up some basic

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tubing ek's well-regarded vardar fans

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and ek's new aluminum compression fittings that they designed specifically

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for these kits where the kits differ

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from each other is in the radiator configurations and the inclusion or

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absence of a universal Pascal GPU block

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but again we'll touch a bit more on that later assembly was easier than you'd

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probably think yeah it's more timec consuming than installing an AIO but it

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also shouldn't take longer than about an hour for the non- GPU kits plus 30 to 45

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minutes for each video card you add and during the process we found both things

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we appreciated compression fittings are

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so much nicer than janky integrated barbs that make the components hard to

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reuse and things that we didn't this

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tubing was a definite cost-saving measure which aside from acquiring us to

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lube it up with warm water and uh push a little harder than we'd like also

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required us to carefully plan our Loop to avoid any excess uh kinkiness on the

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subject of planning if you spring for the

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a240g be sure to check the fine print

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its block is universal as long as you're

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running a GTX 1060 or up and you also

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happen to have a Founders Edition version of your card

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so AMD users and last generation NVIDIA

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users need not apply but we can live

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with all the compromises if fluid gaming lives up to ek's promises so for our

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test we used ek's new kits popular aios

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from Corsair and custom copper components from ek's own lineup on one

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of our ASUS x99 test benches with a core

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i7 5960 X and NVIDIA's Titan XP then to

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eliminate variables to the greatest degree possible we used ek's vardar fans

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running at Max Speed and 1,000 RPM a

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setting that we determined to be a good balance between performance and noise in

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the fractal design Define R5 and the results are mostly as

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expected which is a good thing with the a120 and the copper 120 setup trading

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blows while the h60 legs slightly behind

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moving on the a240 looks like a much

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more compelling value than its little brother for a very small price bump you

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get a radiator that's twice the size and

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another fan which considering its retail value of 18 bucks means based on these

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performance numbers you're getting a lot more bang for your buck Last up to the

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plate is the a240g it's kind of like the rich duncle

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of the a240 like he's actually not much

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better cooling wise but at least he has a boat and by boat I mean a GPU block

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here we got a little creative with our comparative testing putting it up

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against a similar copper Loop and a dual

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AIO setup with NZ xt's Kraken

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g12 obviously that one isn't an ideal

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setup aesthetically but it was the previous value full system water cooling

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king and you can clearly see that that

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is no longer the case so then ek's

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claims of better upgradeability and better performance compared to aio's

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seem to check out so what's the drawback

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well that brings us to why coolants discontinued their Aluminum Products if

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you mix these with Copper products in

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the same loop it's possible now very

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likely that you will experience what's known in the biz as a really bad time or

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galvanic corrosion it can be so bad and

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I don't personally trust any anti-corrosive additive that claims that

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it prevents it that your block can be eaten away to the point where it can

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actually spring a leak so EK is taking a big risk here a

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risk that some user will combine their

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value aluminum lineup with their premium copper lineup and possibly get gunk in

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their blocks or at worst bork his or her

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system but seeing the performance and the price I don't blame them for trying

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and I have to give them credit for tackling this as safely as I think they

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could they're launching these parts exclusively in kits for now rather than

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individually and there are warning labels

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everywhere so bottom line then if you

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want to invest in custom water cooling that you can reuse and upgrade down the

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line but you want to save a few bucks we really like this product as a whole

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especially the a240 and the

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a240g freshbooks help small business

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most importantly it's all cloudbased so

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free trial at freshbooks.com techtips and enter Linus techtips in the

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how you heard about us section you're going to like it so thanks for watching

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guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe

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consider checking out where to buy the products we featured at the link in the

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cool shirts like this one and our community Forum which you should totally

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join