The Conclusion
The big question: How effective are EK’s Fluid Gaming Kits? The honest answer: very. Being keen liquid-coolers, piecing this build together and then converting it to liquid cooling went a lot more smoothly than we thought it would.
We took a chassis that wasn’t the most friendly to work in for liquid cooling, but still had a satisfyingly smooth run to the heady heights of liquid nirvana. The Crystal 570X is a nice glass chassis—if you can stand the smudges—but liquid cooling really isn’t its forte. Sure, the radiator spacing is there, but there is little consideration for things such as pump or reservoir mounting. That said, there weren’t any particular problems we had to work around with it. We took our trusty Dremel 3000 to the floor, unscrewed the case feet, drilled some small mounting points for the pump res combi, and the job was done. EK did also provide us with a radiator bracket to mount the combi to, in case we didn’t have a Dremel to hand.
It was the cooling that really blew us away, though. Typically, we’ve almost always taken advantage of Intel’s processors to liquid cool in the past— however, this time around, we decided to go with Ryzen for a change of pace, and to see what happened when we cooled the mighty eight-core with something a little more substantial. We were particularly dubious when it came to adding a GPU to that loop, though, especially with just a slim 240mm radiator.
The result? Well, we were pleasantly surprised. The drop in temperature we witnessed when we transferred over to liquid cooling on the graphics card, even with the CPU in the loop, and running more processor-intensive DX12 benchmarks, such as 3DMark’s Time Spy, was incredible.
As far as CPU temperature went, there wasn’t a huge disparity between that and the stock RGB cooler that AMD provided, with an 11 percent difference at most. It still made it a worthwhile jump, but nothing as crazily impressive as the drop we saw with the graphics card.
Power draw was one of the more intriguing tests we ran. Even though we only added one pump and two extra fans to the mix, the idle power draw went up by 31W, and the load draw jumped by 16W. Interestingly, EK’s small form factor pump operates from a single PWM header, as opposed to a header and SATA power, like EK’s beefier pump solutions. Although this does reduce power draw, it also reduces flow rate, which may be something to bear in mind for heftier systems if you decide to expand beyond the base kit.
As for that power draw variance at both idle and load (31W difference at idle, and 16W at load), we can only assume this is due to the cooling solution not being ramped up. Unlike the stock air coolers used on both the GPU and the CPU, our liquid-cooled loop’s three components ran on a fixed voltage, meaning they had no need to spin up when the temperature increased across the two parts.
Ultimately, EK’s Fluid Gaming Kit is an easy way to have a quick venture into DIY liquid cooling. If you’re new to the concept, or just fancy a quick and easy build, it’s well worth a look. Invest in some colored dyes, and you can have a purple loop like ours in no time.