INTRODUCTION

   Compared to even just 10 years ago consumers are now getting relatively "good" stock cooling solutions with both their CPUs and GPUs but what happens even if that's just not good enough for some people? Fortunately currently the cooling industry is quite huge with solutions for all market segments so aside all the after-market CPU and GPU air coolers available also are the very effective AIO liquid coolers and the higher-end (which are still consider niche) custom water-cooling kits. As expected most overclockers and enthusiasts choosing to go the way of a custom water-cooling kits usually opt for ones with long 360/420/480/520mm radiators to get the most out of them (especially since aside the CPU waterblock most also add one or more GPU waterblocks) but with a large percentage of consumers using midi, mini-ITX and micro-ATX cases that's not always a possibility. EK Water Blocks is well aware of this so their recently released Performance line includes water cooling kits with 240/280/360mm radiators and today we're going to be testing the 280mm model.

   EK Water Blocks bears the name of its founder Edvard Konig, who started experimenting with liquid cooling in 1999. From humble beginnings in the early years of the previous decade, the company grew steadily to become a global premium liquid cooling gear manufacturer. Today, EKWB offers a complete range of products for liquid cooling, from the renowned Supremacy line of CPU water blocks, to a wide range of CoolStream radiators; from in-house developed Vardar high pressure fans, to the market-proven DDC series of liquid cooling pumps, and thus provides overclocking enthusiasts and dedicated gamers with the best of what the market can offer. With continuous research and design, we’ll always strive to bring extreme liquid cooling performance to our customers all around the world.

   Much like every other water cooling kit in the market today the performance series P280 kit by EK Water Blocks consists by a radiator, pump/reservoir, waterblock and fans. More specifically for the P280 kit EK Water Blocks has combined their high-quality EK-CoolStream CE 280 copper radiator with their EK-XRES 140 Revo D5 PWM cooling pump/reservoir (Xylem D5 water pump), their EK-Supremacy EVO copper water block, two EK-Vardar F2-140 high-static pressure fans and finally 2 meters of their PrimoChill PrimoFlex Advanced LRT premium quality PVC tubing. As already mentioned above with such kits EK Water Blocks aims to cater to the needs of enthusiasts and overclockers using medium to small sized PC cases and since in some occasions we've seen 280mm radiators take head on larger 360mm ones (width and quality are two very important factors) we're quite curious to see just how good this kit really is.