Gadgetory

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 play 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 is new line of custom water cooling parts promises the low cost of a iOS with the future upgrade ability 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 for 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 practicality these days and the funny thing about fashion is that it's a cyclical and decays fluid gaming kits are no exception here their revolutionary feature the fact that they're made exclusively out of aluminum was first popularized by coolant 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 coolants eventually abandon aluminum for copper great question and we'll get into that a bit later first let's take a look at the Freak 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 basical and ones that don't include an easy way to top them up some basic tubing ek is well-regarded Vardar fans and DK's new aluminum compression fittings that they designed specifically for these kids 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 a io 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 Barb's 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 push a little harder than we like also required us to carefully plan our loop to avoid any excess kinkiness on the subjective planning if you spring for the a to 40 G be sure to check the fine print it's 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 e K's promises so for our test we used eks new kits popular a iOS from Corsair and custom copper components from ek zone lineup on one of our Asus x99 test benches with a core i7 59 60 X and NVIDIA Titan XP then to eliminate variables to the greatest degree possible we use ek 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 the results are mostly as expected which is a good thing with the a 120 and the copper 120 setup trading blows while the h-60 legs slightly behind moving on the a2 40 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 a 240 G it's kind of like the rich uncle of the a 240 like you've actually not much better cooling wise but at least he has a vote 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 a i/o setup with an Jetix T's kraken g12 obviously that 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 eks claims of better upgrade ability and better performance compared to a iOS seem to check out so what's the drawback well that brings us to why coolant discontinued their aluminum products if you mix these with copper products in the same loop it's possible may 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 but 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 a 240 and the a 240 G FreshBooks helps small business owners and freelancers get more organized more productive and I mean cash flows everything when you're running a small business get paid more quickly you can create and send professional-looking invoices in seconds you can set up 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