Gadgetory

hey what's going on J here and if you've been following my channel for more than five minutes you should get the vibe already that I am a huge water cooling advocate that should that should really come as no surprise and I've watched water cooling kind of take off and then simmer down and take off again over the 12 years I've been doing it and I've really been trying to make people comfortable with building their own custom water cooling loops especially when you don't really have to do all the legwork to make sure you get all the right parts when you have nice complete kits in a box like this one here from ek which happens to be the ek x360 kit you're not to worry about me having enough fittings or having all the right adapters because it's all in the box well what if you're still not comfortable with that maybe your problem wasn't buying the parts or picking the parts it was just being afraid of assembling it now even though I've done some how to water cool your PC videos showing just how simple it is I understand that there are folks out there who still just don't want to go that route so what do you do well you stay subscribed and you keep watching my channels and you grow a pair I'm just kidding okay that was uncalled for but if you still are not willing to take the leap of faith and try to do your own custom loop you do have an option because ek has just launched their ek water blocks predator all the one water cooling kit and I call it a kit even though it's assembled because there is a lot of functionality in this thing we're going to talk about that coming up right after this did what it's so oh you really think so what is a wife thing well she says it gets the job done - ugh that smell a fractal design node - OH - it's not about how big it is but all about how you use it now what makes the predator unique is the fact that EK has taken like their best-selling products and preassembled them in a all-in-one water cooling kit format basically it is preassembled custom loop it's not like they took you know some sort of a dinky little pump top our block top pump where they put the pump on top of the block and then you just have to kind of hope for the best and hope it lasts and then it's not too noisy this is a full-fledged custom components preassembled by ek so what they did was they took some of their best parts and put them together for you but it also keeps it expandable let's go and start with the block the block here is their ek supremacy MX block this is like kind of a clear plexi it's got holes in here where you could add LEDs if you wanted it's got the backplate pre-installed the hoses are pre-installed it's prefilled obviously so it's the same exact block if you went to ek s online store or performance pcs or wherever and looked at CPU water blocks you would find this block sold by itself for people who want to do custom loops because that's how this cut block was actually you know release first custom block for a custom loop now the tubing on here is not that cheap fep flexible tubing that you tend to see that looks like terrible terrible heater hose this is a real 3/8 inch rubber tube which as you can see here is very very flexible we got no problems maneuvering this thing into position of however you might need it I think the matte colored black tubing looks amazing on this thing and it really kind of adds to the overall aesthetic of the kit now the pump on this thing is a laying DDC 12 volt PWM control pump so this is again the same pump that you would buy on a stand alone if you were building to us a loop on your own buying parts this is a very common pump now the radiator here is their cool stream radiator in fact I've been using the cool stream radiator in my test bench the triple version that the 360 version ever since I got the cryo venom 290 from vision tech which included an EK water block loop I set that up on the test bench and that's been my cooling scenario ever since for the test bench so this is a 240 variant with to 120 millimeters via our 2200 rpm PWM controlled fans but you can also get this in a 360 variant now you do have a fitting right here that you can use for drain and fill as well as the top of a little integrated reservoir right here because the system is expandable this is designed for you to be able to grow or build the system out as your system grows if you need to add say another radiator or another block like a GPU block or something of that nature but when it comes to the cooling if you're doing just a CPU this is going to be more than enough for just about any CPU on the market now what I like is the way that the fans are pre-wired in here using this little control board on the end so you don't have to worry about hooking up fans anywhere you're not to worry about finding enough headers for your fans because the this is going to distribute power based on plugging in this static cable right here so all you've got to do for power is plug in this one cable so they've got power for the pump and the fans all taken care of one power plug you don't have to worry about that and then you plug in the RPM circuit right here for the PWM channel and then you're going to be able to control the pump and the fans together through one fan header that is freaking amazing because one of the worst parts of putting together a custom loop is trying to figure out where the hell you're going to plug in all the fans and the pump and then control them all together Ek is done all the legwork right here and they even have another fan header here they use the same piece here for the 360 so you could have a third fan plugged in right there and you are going to be able to control all of that right off this one unit so what I do is go into your motherboard BIOS or your favorite fan control software if your motherboard has fan control built in and you can do it all at the same time now the only thing I would have liked to have seen is you can obviously do push-pull on this if you put two more fans on the bottom it would have been nice to have seen extra headers on here if you were going to do push-pull because we only have one extra fan header here but room for two more fans at least on this unit so if you were going to do push-pull then you are going to be stuck with the other two fan header is having to be controlled somewhere else now you might have noticed this thing is a little bit thicker than your average all one water cooling unit in fact it's 68 millimeters thick so you're going to want to make sure you have plenty of clearance not only for the 68 millimeters of thickness but also the tubes coming off the bottom in your case to make sure this isn't going to interfere with your motherboard in any way now here's how we're going to test this thing out and some people may say this isn't fair but I don't care because it's all it's all Ek stuff we're testing here is we're going to take the cool stream three sixty millimeter radiator set up I have right now on the test bench cooling my 59 30 K at 4.4 gigahertz we're gonna do a base test on that get temperature readings then we're going to hook this guy up to the 59 30 K and we're going to compare so we're going to see how this all-in-one water cooling loop that's a 240 variant with the pro to our fans compares to the 360 variant and we're going to see whether or not you know this thing actually does what it's designed to do is it going to keep an overclock 59 30 K nice and cool I think we already know the answer to that but let's just go ahead and see how cool it can actually keep it okay so we ran the test here for about 10 minutes as you can see in a 264 which is a stress test so we're stressing the CPU as hard as we possibly can when we do this so keep in mind the temperatures you're going to see here are absolute worst case scenarios because we are doing a floating-point we are doing cash we are stressing the CPU we're even stressing the system memory so this is doing as much heat damage as we can to the CPU to see what happens so our minimums here were in the mid to upper 30s and our maximum is on the core 1 through 6 range anywhere from 70 to 80 1 so we have about 11 degrees swing between the cores which is actually pretty normal but we're sitting here it looks like what's okay so core 174 70 80 173 80 and 72 with a max package temp of 86 so this is actually really good considering this is a 6 core or it's a hex core extreme not extreme but enthusiast CPU that is being stressed as hard as we possibly could and that is at one point three one two volts so you can see the voltage is not super high but it's also not low so I think these temperatures are fantastic for the voltage but it should be it's a triple because it's a triple radiator custom loop so how does the predator perform let's find out alright so I was installing this thing or trying to install it in my ads Rock motherboard and I came across a design flaw that I think is important that I point out so as you can see right here we have got the retention clip is held on with a c-clip right there these are not designed to come off and it's designed to be a dual purpose where the longer thinner thread right here will push all the way through the motherboard and then it will thread on to the retention bracket behind the motherboard to hold it in place and then 4x 79 and X 99 2011 - 3 technically any 2011 socket they use the same retention clips it's designed for this small part to push all the way through the bracket for the thick part to thread in well here's the problem with that my as rock board doesn't actually have holes that go all the way through the motherboard neither does the gigabyte X 99 you d4p as you can see right there there's the socket hole it's solid it doesn't go through and I thought well geez how many motherboards are like this so I grabbed another motherboard out of my closet the x99 gaming 7 and you can see those do have the holes see how the holes go all the way through the socket right there so that's a whole different retention mechanism you know supplier the MSI used so I cannot mount this thing onto my asrock as it is shipped in the state that it's currently shipped in because I can't push them through the holes right there so if you've cut an X 99 this is not going to affect any of the you know LGA - 775 or LGA 1150 1151 it's not going to affect any of those because they all have holes that go all the way through because you have to use a retention bracket so if you are on an x 99 or and x79 you need to look on your motherboard before you buy this to see if it actually has the hole to allow this portion of the thread to push through I can go forward with my review because I still have the the 2011 retention set from the Supremacy block that is on the motherboard now from the custom loop and I'm just going to undo the see clips on the block with the predator and I'm going to use these to hold it down so I can do that test but you if you're looking at buying the predator need to check your motherboard and see if you have the holes and the retention threads or not so those stupid C clips are proving more difficult to get off the night hoped so now for the sake of bringing you guys this video I am literally taking a drill to my motherboard oh dear go slow whoo that is not a comforting feeling at all sure hope I don't break the thing this is probably the most stupid thing I've ever done blow all that off of there and my god I hope my test pinch isn't dead now mmm well guys I killed it and I don't mean like yeah I did it I meant I killed it oh this sucks but hey my my learning experiences can also be yours so I drilled the holes all the way through because I looked at my I looked at my gigabyte board and went okay well they took in these holes into account on the traces so there's there's nothing in the way there when it comes to traces well that's true for the gigabyte board however that is not true for the asrock board so if you look here closely you'll see I drilled right through some of the traces oh man I don't like killing motherboards because of stupid mistakes so let this be a lesson to you the talking finger telling you to check before you drill anyway we went ahead and performed the mod on the x99 you d4p and as you can see there is nothing in the way of those holes those holes were already there I just had to punch out the middle of them so we're go ahead now II just need to check and see that I didn't kill my CPU and my my ram and all that stuff keep your fingers crossed my lord okay well it's installed now we've got the gigabyte UT 4 P in there now and if I said I wasn't disappointed that I killed my house rock board I'd be lying but anyway it's important to also know that that was not ek water blocks fault that was my fault for not looking before I drilled but I did talk to ek before completing this video because I want to know how they were going to address the x99 issue there and they did basically say that there is a note on their website saying as rock and Gigabyte are pretty much using non-standard sockets and that would be a problem right now for people who have those motherboards however they did say that they're going to be including hardware for you to swap out for particular motherboards that may not be compatible with their particular mechanism of mounting so anyway now that everything is working thank God I didn't kill my CPU or the RAM or the Titan X that was in there because when you drill through traces like that and then you stick middle metal posts in there you cause all kinds of problems but anyway let's move forward let's go ahead and benchmark this thing I've got all the parameters identical 1.3 1 volts on the vcore 44 multiplier for a 4.4 gigahertz overclock temperature in the room is identical to what it was earlier and we've got the predator hooked up now so let's go ahead and kind of do a jump cut here and come back with the results okay the test has been running for just over 10 minutes let's go ahead and stop it but school is when the moment you stop the test the PWM circuit sends to the all-in-one and then the fans ramp down and they ramp up based on PWM load so it's going to look at the statistics here as you can see we've got minimums we're sitting in the mid 30s to low 40s and the maximum is here 80 70 183 73 83 72 and in the CPU package 86 so we're within a couple of degrees of a custom loop and the thermal paste on here hasn't even had a time to cure I just put the thing on put the I put the thermal paste on then I put on the block and then ran the test whereas the other block was on here for months and was nice and cured so these temps would actually come down over time but as you can see the speed for the same CPU clocked 4.4 voltage 3.1.3 100 so as you can see we are getting custom loop performance on a smaller radiator and an all-in-one loop that's cool let's go ahead and do some final thoughts here now I could have just as easily left out the whole part where I killed the motherboard and just started over but you know part of doing this especially when you start modding things or you start customizing is things can go wrong and I've killed a 780 through bad BIOS I've now killed a motherboard because I just blindly drilled through it without looking behind there and I learned a lesson today and one that I can guarantee that I will not repeat but I leave these these mistakes in here they happen because you guys can learn from that but anyway there you go I hope this is helped you guys decide that maybe water cooling custom loops isn't for you but you do have options out there where you can get the same benefits of those temperatures without having to do all of the legwork or all the custom building you can literally just bolt it in as long as it takes to mount down the block plug in two cables and then mount the fans to the top of your case or the front of your case or wherever you're going to put it so there you go guys make sure you check out the link down the description if you want to preorder this thing I'm not getting any kickbacks no affiliates or anything but this is probably one of the most anticipated water coolers on the market and we're going to review we're going to do a couple other tests in the future here where we compare it to a swift tech to 20x because I think that's the most common cooler that people are going to ask about and we're going to also compare it to the Corsair h 100 and this thing coming in yet $200 us sounds like a lot but go and look up the price of a lane DDC a 240 mm your cool stream radiator or a small inexpensive reservoirs remember you need a reservoir as well as a iko iko EK supremacy block add those all together plus the fittings plus the coolant plus the tubing and let's see if you can build it for 200 bucks you're not going to build something this nice for 200 so I think the price is definitely right on this alright guys time to get out of here thanks for watching I'll see you on social media and if you're not there then I will see you in my next video I can't believe I killed the motherboard I got really lucky that I didn't kill the CPU RAM and GPU hooked up to it or anything else plugged into the motherboard for that matter when you start when you start drilling through traces and then bridging them with a screw terrible things can happen so let this be a lesson to you look before you drill I'm fortunate that I had another motherboard laying around you guys more than likely don't so please learn from my mistake Jay is a dickhole