EKWB covers an ITX mobo with a water block and it looks awesome
Teeny tiny but oh so shiny.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
I’m so blown away by how cool gaming PC builds are looking in the modern era. Some are RGB light shows with screens displaying animations inside, others are understated discrete little boxes. Others are a little of both and in the ever customisable world of PC Building, often those choices are completely up to you.
EKWB have made a very neat turn mixing laser lightshow with small and discrete PCs by putting amonoblock cooler on an ITX motherboard. The AM4 socket fitting monoblock is dubbed the EK-Quantum Momentum² ROG Strix X570-I Gaming D-RGB and has been made specifically for theAsusROG Strix X570-I Gaming ITX motherboard. If you heard about pesky USB problems with AMD X570 mobos like the excellentGigabyte X570S Aorus Masteror more affordableASRock X570S PG Riptidethosehave since been fixed too.
It’s even designed to work with Asus Aura Sync to customise every diode. Having the flat cooling system fully cover the mobo while giving an RGB glow through the water is a very neat look for a little system. It definitely looks nice and cool in there.
That being said, monoblocks aren’t exactly a common choice for coolers, as they’re built to cover a lot of the motherboard. That’s great in terms of how much cooling you can get, but it means as soon as you’re up for a new motherboard you need a brand new cooling system. Many don’t necessarily find this trade off to be worth it or just prefer to stick to simplerAIO or air coolers.
Best CPU cooler: keep your chip chilled in styleBest PC fans:super-silent and plastered in RGBBest PC cases:big, little, and everything in-between.
But with a small form factor like an ITX motherboard, a bespoke cooler does seem like a good idea. And would probably make it easier to fit in ateeny tiny cute case if you wantedmoreso than other cooling methods might. And the fact that it’s purpose built means it should be relatively hassle free to install. EKWB says the water block can keep an AM4RyzenCPU, VRM section, and the X570 chipset cool without any need for fans by flowing liquid over these critical areas. That sounds good and all but it’s definitely mostly about how nice this thing looks.
Being a very specific and purpose built product means they’re not the cheapest way to keep your tiny PC cool, but for this use case it seems to make a lot of sense. While not out yet, they’re available forpreorder on the EKWB shopfor $209.99 USD, €167.98 Euro or $320 AUD.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find herfictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcastright here.
No, she’s not kidding.
‘One million street-level deals’ worth of methamphetamine smuggled in PC case shipment
Havn HS 420 VGPU PC case review
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
