Yeap, total fail. Why go to all this trouble
and extra money
and extra component weight/dimensions/chassis issues only so as to get standardized 280s thermal dissipation..?
Rhetorical question; you don't
What is of note here is the conclusion of this "review":
1) They show how it performs identically to units costing 100 bucks or so less, yet proceed to call it "excellent" nonetheless.
2) They count its allowing for an expansion (ie so one may add a GPU) as a bonus, when i) considering its thermals, why would one add even more to it, they'd be worse off than they'd be with an air blower and ii) the cost for such an expansion is at best prohibitive as there are "gaming" liquid cooling kits that perform similarly; or more to the point, GPU-centric solutions; that also cost less.
And yet, "excellent" product.
Had a lot of respect for Steve, his videos are are on a different level than most (numbers rather than wow-factor builds, hype-diffusing rather than regurgitating, etc) but this? Second time and in a row too. Their previous video has a wonderful title of "AMD APU crashes", giving the impression we're in for a Ryzen-two-point-o kind of launch, when in fact it was two
non-AMD related software suites that simply needed updating. That's all, a mere updating. Talk about building the wrong image.
Disappointing.
As to EK, like i said and people got angry, they've managed to become the 'Asus' of water cooling. There's money to be made when you're the 'Asus' of something, but not much in terms of quality. I sincerely hope they enjoy their profits (ain't easy and hats off to them for making it there), but i'm more and more inclined to look elsewhere.