LIQUID COOLING MADE EASY

How to cool your PC simply and safely

Ah, liquid cooling, the high-tech love child of a mad plumber and a computer enthusiast. Once upon a time, we lived in a world where the very thought of mixing water and computing hardware was seen as blasphemous. Fast-forward to 2017, however, and it’s now commonplace. AIOs litter the landscape of build guides, highend systems, and even home theater PCs. There have even been attempts to liquidcool entire server rooms in the pursuit of more efficient thermal voiding.

Alas, building your own loop still bears the scars of the stigma that plagued the community all those years ago. And despite being easier and safer now than it ever has been, the comments remain the same: It’s not safe, it costs too much, I don’t want to mess up, what’s the point?

And they’re exactly the kind of comments we want to address here. With EKWB announcing its latest do-it-yourself, complete, aluminum kits, we just had to take them for a full-on test drive. Hopefully proving, once and for all, that custom liquid cooling isn’t just a pursuit for the affluent, but something that anyone who’s passionate about their rig can do, too.

To break it down, these new Fluid Gaming Kits are available in three different SKUs: a 120mm CPU version at $150, a 240mm variant at $160, and a 240mm kit with GPU and CPU blocks for $240, the latter of which is compatible with any Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 series and above GPU, featuring a reference PCB (although a Vega option is on its way). All three kits come with tubing, fans, fittings, coolant, radiators, blocks, and the pump-res combo that you need to build your own liquid cooling system from scratch.

For the price of an NZXT Kraken X62, you can hook yourself up with an efficient expandable loop, capable of dispersing the heat from your precious components. Couple that with the included Vardar fans, and this suddenly becomes a clean, bespoke cooling system, just for you.

So, join us as we debunk some of the oldest and dirtiest myths surrounding the greatest of PC enthusiast pursuits….