INTRODUCING POWERED BY ASUS WATER-COOLED PCs

PC-HARDWARE POWERHOUSE ASUS IS INTRODUCING A NEW SERIES OF GAMING PCs TO THE AUSTRALIAN MARKET, WHICH COME EQUIPPED WITH ENTHUSIAST-GRADE CUSTOM WATER-COOLING RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX.

AIMED AT USERS LOOKING FOR THE BEST bang-for-buck, the Ninja is the mostaffordable of ASUS’s new water-cooling range and it aims to give buyers excellent day-to-day gaming performance combined with an eye-catching build. It’s been specifically designed by ASUS’s own water-cooling experts and it’s available through selected Aussie system builders right now.

At the Ninja’s heart is an Intel Core i5-6400 CPU — a quad-core Skylake chip that normally hums along quielty at 2.7GHz, but can boost up to 3.3GHz. Graphics grunt is handled by an ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970, which comes factory overclocked. The Ninja runs 8GB of Kingston HyperX Fury 2133MHz C14 DDR4 RAM, configured as two 4GB chips. Storage is handled by a hybrid setup, with a super-fast Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 SSD as the primary drive, and a secondary 1TB HDD for extra space. The whole shebang is powered by an In Win 900W PSU, and sits in an ASUS B150 Pro Gaming Aura motherboard.

To keep it all cool, the system features a custom-built Bitspower water-cooling system feeding into a large front-mounted radiator. It’s not just for the CPU either, with a water block added to the video card, and all using quality rigid tubing and compression fittings. When the system is purchased from an ASUS Water Cooling Certified reseller, it comes with full warranty support on the GPU, despite the fact that its original air-cooling system has been removed — a step that would normally void the ASUS warranty.

Thanks to that B150 Pro Gaming Aura motherboard, the Ninja has plenty of connectivity options, not to mention funky LED lighting built in. Round the back you get 4 x USB 3.0 ports (as well as 2 x USB 2.0), dual USB 3.1 (one Type-C, one Type-A), plus Gigabit Ethernet, PS/2, VGA and HDMI ports. The board uses ASUS SupremeFX audio that gives 5 x 3.5mm outputs, as well as S/PDIF output. The audio is based on the Realtek ALC1150 codec, and no surprise, the sound quality is top notch.

The end result is a powerful PC which can happily handle the latest games at 1080p with the highest detail settings, and it also manages to remain pretty quiet under full load thanks to that custom water-cooling setup. Of course if you want to go beyond 1080p gaming, or have a high-framerate gaming monitor, then it’s worth looking at one of the Ninja’s higher-spec siblings.

All that custom hardware is contained in an In Win 805 case — a great looking, sharplyangular chassis that’s clad in tempered glass and available in either black or red. The build-quality and attention to detail are both excellent, with neatly routed cables, unimpeded airflow and a simplified, freeflowing water-cooling design. There’s also plenty of space for future expansion if you want to add more PCIe devices, extra drives, or just more stylish bling.

Even though it’s on the more affordable end of the scale, the Ninja is still a confident gaming machine — and one that’ll certainly turn heads next time you’re at a LAN. And for anyone with a slightly different spec in mind, the system can be further customised to suit your individual needs.