EKWB Predator 240 & 360 Liquid Coolers - Uncompromised performance?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,162 words · ~5 min read
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for a long time now if you wanted to water cool your system you had one of
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two options either you bought a closed loop sealed liquid cooler which has some
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uh lacking customizability and options or you bought a bunch of different
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individual parts put them together yourself which while interesting can be
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difficult for those who are not experienced tinkerers but lately we've
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been seeing units that offer the convenience of an all-in-one showing up
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at your door pre-made but have the expandability of a do-it-yourself
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solution enter the e Predator 240 and EK Predator 360 which also claim a fairly
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significant amount more performance does it live up to that claim stay tuned to
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find
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out the master case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your
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midtower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check
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the link in the video description to learn more now what's interesting about
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the predator is that it's not really its own product at all it's kind of more an
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assembly of other parts all of the individual Parts the pump the rad the
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block Etc you can actually get from Ek including the vardar fans that are
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included so more or less this is a kit
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that comes pre-assembled and that's actually kind of cool it also comes with
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a Fan Hub which is really nice and the cable management around the unit is
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great although one not necessarily good thing depending on what your system is
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configured as is that the Predator is exclusively an Intel socket cooler it
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does not have compatibility for AMD CPUs so yeah be wary of that if you are an
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AMD CPU user also if you are a user of
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an LGA 2011-3 board that doesn't have mounting
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screws that go all the way through the PCB you will need to order special
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screws from ek's website why they don't include this I don't know especially
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considering it's a high-end cooler i' I'd appreciate those four extra
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screws the installation went pretty well except
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for one pretty significant hiccup one of the fittings popped out of the block and
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we had a pretty major leak on our hands going all over our system which was not
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fun it should be noted that expandable aios will have a higher likeliness of
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coming apart the non-expandable ones a lot of non-expandable ones are heat
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sealed and stuff and expandable ones are designed to be able to be taken apart
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but it shouldn't pop out after a couple twists and turns from installing it in
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your system so that was a bit of a disappointment once we were done
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cleaning everything up we mounted the Predator 240 inside of our Corsair C70
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case and ran ID to 64 stability tests on the CPU and then firm mark on the GPU
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just to kind of heat things up in the system it performed quite well at 1100
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RPMs and even when we cranked the fan speed up to full they weren't too loud
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and the performance did improve which was good to see and good to hear but
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since we mentioned earlier the EK Predator series is an expandable Loop so
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we wanted to test it with more things in the loop thanks EK K they sent us a
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Titan X water block so that we could use it in the same system the 240 the EK
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Predator 240 had some issues bleeding
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the air bubbles in the loop that was a little frustrating so we moved up to the
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360 which we kind of wanted to bench anyway so it was fine it also features
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quick disconnects so it was a lot easier to add something to the loop because you
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could just partially take the loop apart without anything leaking without the need to refill add things to it and then
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keep on moving on I must note here that we had to just kind of leave the 360 mm
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rad outside of the case the Corsair C70 that we used doesn't really work with
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360 mm cases unless you do some pretty
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intense ghetto modding and even then not so much so we opted to leave it outside
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it's not really a fair comparison against the other coolers but we did crank up furmark to 4K and with 4K
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furmark running on the GPU and the CPU still being pushed by ID 64 stability
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test the temperatures on this thing were
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pretty impressive I was quite happy with it so in conclusion if you're looking
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for a more advanced water cooling setup but still don't necessarily want to
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piece everything together yourself or if you're experience and have pieced things
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together before but just want the premium components just want to put it in your case relatively quickly the
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Predator is not a bad idea really high performance feels very premium all
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around has a fan controller built in all that kind of stuff it is a little
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expensive and if you can fit a 360 mm rad in your case I might recommend
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actually moving up it's a lot more Cooling and you get those quick
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disconnects which if you are going to expand this system are really nice
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especially because it's not the easiest thing in the world to bleed Logitech has
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been in the headphone game for a really long time and it shows with the g633
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emis Spectrum headset the g633 is equipped with logitech's 40 mm proog
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audio drivers 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound
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with Logitech gaming software a cardioid boom mic which hides away very nicely in
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the headset a fully adjustable RGB lighting setup and custom tags they're
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available from a variety of retailers now including Amazon and could be a
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great holiday gift for a PC Xbox or even PS4 gamer or just a great pickup for
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yourself if you're looking for a new headset check them out in the link in the video description down below if you
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up in twitch shirts I don't know if you're looking for more stuff to watch
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click up here you can check what other water cooling videos we've done made
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click the button it's fine