EK Fluid Gaming: Water-Cooled Gaming PC Build Guide

Introduction to EK Fluid Gaming

I've been an enthusiast for over two decades now, but I've never bothered with watercooling my PC. It's not something that most enthusiasts would admit, but I simply never got into it, and never had the time. I thought that it was high time that I got into it, and began working behind the scenes on securing someone locally that could do two things: build watercooled PCs, and they had to be a case modder.

Well, earlier this year I began talking seriously with a case modder that happened to live within a 15-minute drive of me, Ryan Hooper, who now mods PCs for TweakTown on a part-time basis. His first gig was to build an EK Water Blocks system using their new EK Fluid Gaming components, which is what we're here to share with you today.

What Is EK Fluid Gaming?!

EK Water Blocks expanded out in the more "mainstream" water cooling market with its new EK Fluid Gaming components, but EK are the masters of their craft... so if you want to build an insane high-end custom rig, EKWB is what you want.

For those who want a silent PC experience, liquid cooling is many times more effective at cooling your system than air cooling. CPUs and GPUs are only getting hotter and hotter as more and more transistors and technology are being crammed into them, which is where EKWB comes into play with their plethora of watercooling components.

Silent gaming is a big part of this, and when you're overclocking this is even more important. EK Fluid Gaming reduced the sound output of our system by leaps and bounds, with the TITAN X now not having a fan AT ALL, it's completely silent in operation. During gaming, totally silent.

EK provides an easy step-by-step instruction guide for every water cooling kit they sell, with an "error-preventing installation design" used in all of EK's new Fluid Gaming gear. There's just a few screw required, and that's about it. Awesome stuff from EK.

System Specs

GIGABYTE helped us out with their GA-Z270-Gaming K3 motherboard, while we supplied the Intel Core i5-7650K processor. Corsair supplied us with a 32GB kit of DDR4-4000 RAM in the form of the CMK32GX4M4B4000C19R kit, as well as the Carbide Air 540 chassis, and the AX860i PSU inside.

Our friends at ADATA supplied the M.2 SSD, too. CableMod joined the party with their C-Series cables, too.

We purchased all of the EK Water Blocks parts ourselves, including:

• EK Fluid Gaming A240G CPU & GPU Liquid Cooling Kit
• EK Fluid Gaming EK-FG360 Expansion Pack
• EK DuraClear (3m) Tubing
• EK-Cryofuel - Blood Red

The Build - In Progress

The build took less than 10 hours over two days, with the EK Fluid Gaming parts really standing out as we were building the system. The finished result looks amazing, but the journey there was just as exciting. Without me typing it all up, I have a bunch of pictures to show you instead.

This is where we started, with an octopus-like load of cables and crap coming out everywhere.

A better look at what we're about to hide away.

Once again from the top.

From the very top.

The last shot before we tidy up the cables.

Isn't that like, worlds better?!

Nice and neat thanks to the cable hider that Corsair includes in the Carbine Air 540.

We save a heap of room at the bottom near the PSU as well, and it also looks a hell of a lot better.

The Build - TITAN X + EBWB

I wanted to put a high-end graphics card inside but needed my new TITAN Xp graphics cards for testing, but thankfully I had a spare NVIDIA TITAN X(P) graphics card. The TITAN X (Pascal) is still a great GPU and can be pushed damn high in the overclocking department thanks to the EK Fluid Gaming watercooling hardware... all while it stays under 44C at all times.

I was able to reach 2100MHz on the GPU, an increase of 235MHz above boost GPU clocks, with maximum temperatures of 44C on the GPU thanks to the EK Fluid Gaming watercooling. My first massive OC experience under water and I'm seeing some impressive things here that are really putting a smile on my dial - 44C @ 100% GPU usage @ 100% GPU overclock. Awesome.

The NVIDIA TITAN X, completely naked - the entire cooler removed, and cleaned up. Beautiful, isn't it?

With some EKWB waterblock love installed.

Another shot so you can see what is going on underneath the waterblock itself.

Some more shots to finish the EKWB + TITAN X mash up.

The Build - Finished

The finished product is beautiful. EK Fluid Gaming is a great option for gamers who want to watercool their PC, but don't have thousands to spend on components and watercooling products. Let us know what you think of the finished product!

Here it is, with the side panel on - but inside, it looks gorgeous in detail.

You can easily see here how the EK Fluid Gaming components feed into one another, with the water flowing between the CPU and the GPU, down next to the PSU and into the pump on the right.

Ryan did a great job with the TweakTown 'TT' logo, which looks sweet as hell in red/black.

We have the back of the TITAN X here, looking even better than the reference card thanks to EK's much better styling.

Thanks to our friends at ADATA, we have an XPG M.2 SSD that pumps out speeds of 2GB/sec.

It might not look like much, but this is important. You can see that water is going in, and out of the pump here.

Here we have some red light bleeding from above the PSU, which adds to the overall style of the mod.

A great shot of the entire PC.

Some more detail to look at.

My favorite shot of the entire mod, without bias of course!

More To Come

The build is complete, and I've been pumping some time into PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on it all week, but now the benchmarks are coming. We will be testing the system at 1080p, 1440p, 3440x1440, and 4K in various synthetic benchmarks and games, like PUBG.

Our new custom PC powered by EK Fluid Gaming components is virtually silent and doesn't ever run too hot. Even with the GPU overclocked as far as I can push it, there are no temperatures above 50C. This is an achievement in itself, as most GTX 10 series/TITAN X graphics cards run at 80C+ in reference/Founders Edition form.

Every time I catch myself looking over at the system, my heart skips a beat. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's quiet, it's cool. It's everything you want in a gaming system, and you don't need to spend an arm, leg, and kidney to get there. We will have more case mod articles and very soon, many 4K videos of our mods that we'll be sharing with you.

This is just the beginning...