EK AIO Elite 360 Review – Sample water chiller with six fans

By Faryad On Dec 10, 2020

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On the EK-AIO Elite 360 we no longer encounter custom features such as expandability, but EK directly competes with established names in the market for all-in-ones. With a total of six RGB fans, this water cooler is certainly an eye-catcher. With the supplied fan hub, EK has also come up with a nice extra to distinguish itself. However, the performance is disappointing compared to other ready-to-use 360mm coolers.

Pros

Enthusiasts can have fun with six RGB fans
Handy included fan hub
Easy installation…

Cons

…provided this colossus fits in your closet
Lean cooling performance
Expensive in relation to the performance offered

EK recently approached us for a review of a promising product. The AIO Elite 360 is the ultimate water cooler according to the Slovenian manufacturer. With a total of six RGB fans and an improved pump integrated in the CPU block, it is certainly an eye-catcher. We will find out in this review whether EK, with all its experience in the field of custom water cooling, can also threaten the established names in the research assistant market when it comes to performance.

Water cooling is on the rise in the hardware world. Many PC builders prefer an all-in-one water cooler because of its sleek appearance alone, even if it performs not crazy much better than a luxury air cooler. Interestingly, the brands that dominate the sale of off-the-shelf water coolers – primarily Corsair, NZXT and in the budget segment Cooler Master – none have a long history when it comes to the traditional form of water cooling, where you build your own pump. , radiator and cooling block(s).

A manufacturer like EK does, of course. The first attempts to enter the market for research assistants were therefore characterized by features that only a custom cooling manufacturer can offer. The EK Predator from 2016, for example, had a system with real quick-disconnects, so that you could add a video card to the loop without draining the system . Such attempts did not really catch on, so that we no longer see them in the AIO Elite 360 we are discussing today; it is a completely closed circle.

The EK-AIO Elite 360 is currently only sold through EK’s own webshop , where it costs 203 euros at the time of writing.

Pump and CPU block

The waterblock for the processor comes pre-installed with a mounting plate that is compatible with all current Intel sockets, but also includes the necessary installation material for AMD’s socket AM4. The block is finished with a nickel-plated black housing, which of course cannot be missed with an illuminated EK logo, and touches the processor with a copper baseplate. EK has installed miniscule cooling fins on the inside, so that the surface for the transfer of the CPU heat to the cooling water is maximized.

The pump is also housed in the cpu block, which is a pump that is technically comparable to the separate spc pumps that EK sells. It can be controlled via PWM, with a range of 1000 to 3300 rpm. The tubing with sleeves and rotating aluminum fittings is connected on the side. The hoses are 40cm long, which will suffice for the vast majority of builds.

Radiator and fans

With a thickness of 27mm, the black radiator can be called relatively thin, although the large number of fans means you still need a lot of space to fit it all. There are no less than six 120mm fans on the EK-AIO Elite 360: three on each side. It concerns a home-made Vardar fan, which is said to be optimized for high static pressure. That is, as it were, the forward force with which the fan forces air through the radiator. Nine addressable RGB LEDs are incorporated into the fans ‘ motors , illuminating the milky, semi-transparent fan blades.

Six fans and a pump, each with two cables, one for control and one for RGB, results in a substantial wiring harness. To neatly hide all cables and prevent you from losing all fan headers on your motherboard in one fell swoop, EK includes a hub printed circuit board. There are seven connectors of both types, plus a SATA power connection for the necessary plug. In principle, you will have one fan connector left, because the intention is to connect the pump to a separate header of your motherboard. In total, you need two fan headers and one addressable rgb header, with three pins, on your motherboard to connect the EK-AIO Elite correctly.

Installation

As mentioned, the EK-AIO Elite 360 comes with the Intel mounting hardware pre-installed. The installation on a mainstream Intel platform is therefore quite obvious. You screw a backplate to the back of the motherboard, place the pump on the processor and tighten four thumbscrews. There is already thermal paste on the baseplate from the factory, of which you must of course remove the cover first.

Before installing the radiator, you should already mount the bottom three fans. You install the three fans that have to come between the housing and the radiator together with the radiator itself with twelve extra long screws. They go through the top of your case and the fans before reaching the threads in the radiator. So the full height of the radiator plus two fans, about 77mm in total, should fit in your case. So there must either be enough space above your motherboard or your motherboard must not have connectors and vrm heatsinks at the top that interfere with the water cooler. We installed the cooler in a Phanteks Enthoo Pro housing with an ASUS ROG Strix X299-XE Gaming motherboard, which we just managed to fit with some maneuvering.

Mounting on a socket 2066 motherboard is even easier; you don’t need a backplate for that, but you drive the screws directly into the mounting mechanism of the socket itself. On an AMD socket AM4 motherboard, you must first remove the standard plastic cooler mounts and replace the Intel bracket on the CPU block with the AMD variant.

Incidentally, EK’s manual reveals that a 280mm version of the AIO Elite water cooler is also being worked on, which will of course have four 140mm fans.

Test method

Our test method for CPU coolers is based on processor simulators mounted in an insulated room with a stable temperature. This approach ensures that we lock in variables such as the heat output of the processor and the temperature of the air in the case, so that each processor cooler is tested in exactly the same conditions. Since the differences between coolers are sometimes very small, this is necessary to achieve reliable and reproducible test results.

Performance

In the graphs below, we have included other common water coolers with a 360mm radiator in addition to the EK AIO Elite 360. You can recognize the EK cooler by the red bar.

Socket 1200

In fairness, we must say that the water coolers, with 40dB(A) of noise production, do not differ much from each other in the test. Still, we have to conclude that the EK cooler ends at the bottom. Even if we increase the noise production to 50dB(A), it does not come close to the ‘benchmark’ in this segment, the NZXT Kraken X72. In the tests with a fixed voltage, the EK cooler performs somewhat better in relative terms, although we will see later that it is not exactly the quietest.

Socket 2066

Sometimes we see the order of each other when we look at the larger socket, because some coolers benefit more from the larger available cooling surface than others. However, this does not seem to be the case with the EK cooler. In the tests with a fixed noise production, it only manages to beat the Cooler Master ML360R, which we must note is considerably cheaper. In the test with both the pump and the fans fully loaded, the EK AIO Elite 360 finished last.

sound production

If we zoom in on the noise production, we measure almost 32dB(A) when the pump is running at full speed. That is fairly average. The fans are somewhat on the loud side, as evidenced by the 45dB(A) that we measure at 7V. At 12V the cooler produces 56dB(A) of noise. This makes it slightly quieter than, for example, the Kraken X72 and the ROG Ryujin, but they clearly perform better.

Conclusion

Where EK has tried to distinguish itself until now by bringing ‘custom features’, such as expandability to all-in-one water coolers, the EK-AIO Elite 360 is the first serious attempt to compete directly with big names such as Corsair and NZXT. The cooler looks impressive, if only because of the six fans, while the included fan hub definitely offers added value. The installation process is simple, provided your housing offers (more than) enough space to house this behemoth.

Ultimately, however, we judge a cooler mainly on its performance. In that respect, EK leaves it behind compared to the rest of the, admittedly, very strong test field. Both in the tests with a fixed noise production and in the voltage-based tests, we regularly find the cooler in the lower regions of the graphs. Especially when you consider that the EK-AIO Elite 360 is equipped with twice as many fans as the other coolers and has a hefty price, that’s not good.

The EK-AIO Elite 360 is a cooler that mainly relies on its special appearance. If you are purely concerned with the cooling performance, then you are still better off with the established competition.

EK AIO Elite 360 ​​Review – Sample water chiller with six fans