Introduction

When PC DIY watercooling started out, everyone was adapting automobile watercooling to PCs - aluminum was the metal of choice, and there was no real standard for years. It was then that people put serious thought into the design of waterblocks and radiators and switched to copper to achieve significant improvements in cooling and heat dissipation. Things started saturating out after that, and EK Water Blocks (or EKWB as shall be referred to henceforth) was no exception. What do you do when you are the biggest brand in a very specific business where innovation is hard to come by and tangible gains are even harder to find? With heat sources in the PC DIY industry getting more and more efficient, PC DIY watercooling is getting all the more niche of a market, and it does not help that a CPU waterblock from five years ago is still within error margins in a lot of published tests. EKWB thinks it is time to use the knowledge and expertise gained in the last decade to go back to where it all started - aluminum.

Yes, there are aluminum blocks and radiators available for purchase from unknown brands and sellers on eBay, Taobao and the lot. I had actually purchased one last year out of curiosity and ended up discarding it after it came with no installation hardware, a poorly translated manual, and no help from the seller. Closed loop coolers (CLCs) involve either getting one for your CPU and GPU each or picking an expandable option, which is not really recommendable due to the use of mixed metals and an environmentally unfriendly coolant to delay galvanic corrosion accordingly. An all-aluminum loop as a well-thought-out kit with 2017 design and manufacturing does as such have the scope to introduce a whole new audience to DIY watercooling, those who want the benefits and the coolness factor of watercooling a computer, but at a lower cost of entry. Thanks a lot to EKWB for providing a review sample for testing.


EKWB has three kits under their new Fluid Gaming line - the A120, A240 and A240G - with the differences being the size of the radiator (single 120 mm or dual 120, aka 240 mm) and whether a GPU waterblock is included. Today, we take a look at the Fluid Gaming A240G kit, which comes with all you need to cool a CPU and an Nvidia 10-series GPU (GTX 1070, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, Titan X Pascal, or Titan Xp). Given the nature of this kit, there will be a lot of things to cover, and I encourage you to read through the whole article if you have the time.

Packaging and Accessories

EKWB operates a webshop from wherein this sample also came and thus, we begin with a look at the shipping packaging. The kit, along with the other two in the Fluid Gaming lineup, arrived immaculately packaged in a good-sized box with packing air bags all around. No complaints here!


There is a plastic wrap around the package itself, and once removed, we see that EKWB has a black and red color scheme with some shades of green to indicate the NVIDIA GPU support. Every single side is adorned with illustration, specifications, and marketing features galore, and there is a very useful contents and hardware support summary on one side for the brick-and-mortar store shoppers browsing around. There is also a single flap in the middle to help keep the contents inside in place.


Open the kit packaging and we see.. more product packages! All watercooling kits I have received thus far have essentially been a collection of individual items bundled together at a discount, and this is similar, but not identical. The differences are in a kit-specific collection in the white cardboard box and the fact that you can not purchase any of these items individually at this time. EKWB wants to keep people from mixing dissimilar metals in the electropotential series, and I agree.

The Fluid Gaming A240G kit contains the aforementioned white kit box, a brown cardboard box that houses the radiator, a GPU block, two of their Vardar series 120 mm fans, and a very detailed, well-written manual with lots of illustrations and explanations covering the installation and maintenance of your upcoming watercooling loop. A product installation guide/manual is usually the difference between easing a newcomer into custom watercooling and getting someone to quit in the middle, so major props to EKWB for this.

The White Kit Box

Okay, I made up the name for the sake of convenience; this box simply stores the rest of the kit safely. Its official name seems to be EK-Kit A.


This is a plain cardboard box with a simple label on the outside, and opening it, we see two compartments. The outer, smaller compartment houses two sets of mounting hardware in plastic ziplock pouches, an Allen key, and an aluminum pump bracket to help install the provided reservoir/pump combo unit directly to any location with support for a 120 mm fan - your case, the fan-free side of the radiator, etc. The first pouch is labeled to contain the mounting hardware for the ACR SPC-60, the aforementioned reservoir/pump combo unit, which is based off their existing reservoir/pump combo unit using the same pump. Combined with the fan-mounting bracket, you thus have plenty of options to install it as the provided screws fit the threaded holes in the provided radiator as well. The second pouch contains the mounting for the included Supremacy AX CPU block, which too is based off an existing product. Here, we see support for the latest Intel and AMD consumer CPU sockets from the past five years or more.


The inner compartment houses quite a few different items, including their new DuraClear 10/13 mm clear soft tubing on top of other products packaged neatly in shaped foam pockets. We will take a look at some of these separately, but as far as accessories go, EKWB has provided a bunch, all neatly inside separate plastic pouches - a SATA to 2-pin adapter to power the pump directly from the PSU without having to power any of the computer hardware, a 1 gram tube of their Ectotherm thermal paste, a 24-pin ATX cable bridge tool for the PSU to provide power without the 24-pin cable being connected to a motherboard directly, a 4-pin PWM extension cable, and a 3:1 4-pin PWM splitter cable to connect, power, and control the two fans and the pump over a single PWM fan header. I would have liked to see a filling bottle or a funnel adapter included here, although I do concede that the former would have made this a much larger box. Shown in the penultimate image also are two aluminum 10/13 mm compression fittings with black compression collars, which we will see below in more detail.