EK FLUID GAMING 270 VANQUISH
What’s cooler than being cool?
BUILDING A CUSTOM liquid loop yourself is hard. Why do that work yourself, when you could pay someone far more experienced to build it for you? While we here at MaximumPC will always advocate for building systems with your own hands, it’s hard to argue against the level of professionalism on display in the EK Fluid Gaming range.
We’re looking at the Fluid Gaming 270 Vanquish, the “mid-range” offering from EK’s pre-built gaming series—although calling this $2,900 beast mid-range is laughable. The 270 Vanquish rocks an RTX 2080 Super for graphics, and an eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 3800X processor, backed up by 32GB of highspeed memory from HyperX.
So, it’s a powerhouse machine. All of EK’s systems are capable gaming maxhines, and this one is no exception. As you can see from our benchmarks, the 270 Vanquish can handle the latest games in 4K, although more demanding titles might be better off at 1440p. We’d expect as much for a system that costs this amount, but the main draw here is that sweet, sweet liquid-cooling loop.
This is EK’s own design and parts, collectively called the EK Hardline loop. EK-HD tubes and fittings connect to highend RGB-lit water blocks for the CPU and GPU, fed not by a conventional tower reservoir but a sleek distribution plate at the front of the case. Heat dissipation is handled by a 360mm EK-Alustream radiator with three RGB fans. The plate is also illuminated by an LED strip, which looks great when filled with clear coolant.
The setup process is relatively straightforward. A large bottle of Cryofuel coolant comes included, along with a tubed bottle to easily fill the distribution plate. It’s not exactly plugand-play, since completely filling the system requires restarting and cycling multiple times before it’s ready to use, but it comes with a simple step-by-step guide and only requires the standard Windows 10 setup once you’ve got it running. It does need more TLC than an average air-cooled system, but topping up and cycling the coolant is easy enough.
Despite the powerful components, front-mounted pump, and multiple fans, the Vanquish isn’t a particularly noisy machine, perhaps a feature that can be accredited to the stylish Lian Li case. Even during stress tests, the CPU temperature never rose above 50 C, while a spot of regular gaming barely saw it scrape 35 C. That liquid loop clearly does the job.
CPU performance is strong, but this is a gaming system, and the graphics card is the main attraction here. The RTX Super line has some of the best performance GPUs available right now, and the 2080 Super is an excellent choice for this machine. A slightly cheaper RTX 2070 Super version of the Vanquish is also available, and might appeal to those who don’t have a 4K monitor (or don’t quite have $3K to drop on a gaming PC).
Let’s break that $2,900 down for a moment, and consider the value proposition at play here. We did a bit of online browsing, and we reckon that any dedicated builder could assemble a system just like this— sans the custom cooling loop—for around $2,300. That leaves us with $600 going solely on cooling (and the knowledge that your system will be perfectly built with no effort on your part).
It might sound like a lot to dedicate to system cooling, especially given that the Ryzen 7 3800X comes with a free stock cooler, but the breakdown actually fits. The RGB water block for the GPU alone is worth over $100. If you’re looking to build a high-end liquid-cooled system, buying a pre-built model from EK will barely cost you more than buying the components new and assembling the system yourself.
So, the EK Fluid Gaming 270 Vanquish is a stunning gaming PC with absolutely top-notch cooling and dazzling aesthetics to boot, and we can’t recommend it enough. 3TB of high-speed SSD storage and a sweet three-year product warranty are simply icing on the cake. Just please negotiate among yourselves to determine who gets to buy one; if they sell too many pre-built machines, we might find ourselves out of a job!