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 lowcost AI
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's not a lot of improvement left to make so again 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 upgradeability not to mention nearly all the performance of custom
water cooling but can it hold up to all
these claims let's find
out LTX the first Meetup we've done in
over two years go check it out only like
800 tickets
remaining I've said for a while that water cooling is more about fashion than
practical ality these days and the funny thing about fashion is that it's uh
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 coolants 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 coolant
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 that EK is selling today each
one of them includes an allnew aluminum CPU block called the supremacy ax a pwm
controlled pump with an integrated tube Reservoir already 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 timec 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 acquiring us to
lube it up with warm water and uh 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 Founders Edition version of your card
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 5960 X 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 1,000 RPM a
setting that we determined to be a good balance between performance and noise in
the fractal design Define R5 and the results are mostly as
expected which is a good thing with the a120 and the copper 120 setup trading
blows while the h60 legs 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 duncle
of the a240 like he's actually 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 NZ xt'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 upgradeability and better performance compared to aio's
seem to check out so what's the drawback
well that brings us to why coolants discontinued their Aluminum Products if
you mix these with Copper products in
the same loop it's possible now very
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 that
it prevents 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 lineup with their premium copper lineup 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
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