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EK Waterblock L 360 Kit Review

Cooling/Water Cooling by leeghoofd @ 2013-05-10

During the last years, many cooling vendors included all in one liquid cooling solutions into their lineups. While being very popular, thanks to the good cooling performance, plus requiring zero maintenance and their ease of installation, the 120mm models had a major drawback. The noise generated was either at a disturbing level when the end user required maximum cooling. Or the cooling performance would get a significant performance hit, when the fan speeds were lowered. The larger 240mm models coped far better with modern processors. Thanks to the larger dissipation area the 240 versions allowed them to operate at a far more acceptable noise level. With the new breed 140 or 280mm AIOs the gap is closed again with the full blown do-it-yourself watercooled kits. Today we review a true watercooling kit, in it's purest form: the Slovenian EK waterblocks LT 360.

Test Setup and Methodology

The Madshrimps testbed comprises of the following parts:

ASUS Sabertooth X79 motherboard
Intel i7-3960X stock and OC'ed at 4500MHz 1.35 Vcore
G.Skill 16GB 2133MHz C9 rams
Western Digital 1TB Green Caviar HDD
ASUS Geforce GTX480 video card
Corsair HX1000W Power supply
Corsair C70 Vengeance case with Air Series Fans installed.
Ambient air temperature is 20°C

Prime95 is our CPU torture test of preference. By selecting the Custom test and setting 12-12K, we force the CPU to go straight flat out. After 60 minutes we verify in RealTemp the maximum load temperature results across the 6 cores. For the idle temperatures we just allow the system to warm up during a period of 15 minutes. Just basic idling at either stock for the air cooled setups and/or 4500MHz for the AIO units, doing nothing more then just monitoring the temperatures.

The monitoring software we use is RealTemp version 3. And the output results are the average out of three runs.

We compare the EK L 360 kit versus any cooler, being it air or AIO, that we have ever tested on this setup. Only thing we changed was the approach to obtain the average out of three runs. Since most AIO's have preapplied thermal paste we left the mounting as it was and just re-ran the prime test. With the EK L 360 kit we remount the CPU block and likewise reapply the thermal paste before each run.

Alike with the other coolers tested, the setup is tested at full blast ( 12V or 1600rpm Fan speed ) and once with the fans running at 9V.

Last but not least we swapped the included Supreme LTX for it's high end cousin the Supremacy Full Copper block. Being less restrictive and at double the cost price we look if we can nibble off a few more precious degrees C.

Noise measurement for the fans is done via Corsairs Air Fan Reviewers' Guide. Thus measuring the generated FAN noise at 1 meter from the Fan's front. Fans were hooked up straight to a PSU via a molex adapter. Noise tests are only conducted at 12V.

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