THE CONCEPT

WELL, THIS WAS FUN. As we explained in our liquid cooling feature (pg. 36), EKWB sent us one of its latest Fluid Gaming Kits. In fact, it sent us two: a standard 240mm CPUonly loop, and one with an additional GPU block. Naturally, we gravitated to the latter, not because it’s pricier than its $160 kin, but because it’s the more intriguing solution. We’re used to cooling processors off a single 240mm radiator, but adding a GPU to the loop (literally), a part that can pack some serious heat, just seemed ludicrous.

We made the decision to go with Ryzen at the very last minute. We’ve been wanting to revisit the platform for some time now. As both BIOS and micro-code have developed over the past few months, the platform has gone from being a touch sketchy to a wellequipped all-rounder, filled to the brim with serious computational performance. Overclocking has always been its limitation, though, with most parts only ever capable of boosting the clock speed by an additional 200–300MHz. And it’s not heat that limits the plucky processor, but silicon, with most, if not all, Ryzen chips being limited to around the 4GHz mark, Threadripper included.

That said, contrary to popular belief, it’s not a hot part. Once you strip off the ridiculous +20 C offset AMD imposes on the internal temperature monitoring, it’s actually cooler than a lot of Intel’s latest Kaby Lake parts. Weird, huh?