XSPC RayStorm 750 EX240 Water Kit
Having built PCs since the 1990s it seemed a little sad that the closest I’ve come to water cooling a build was installing a Corsair H100 into our Stryker gaming rig. Whilst I wouldn’t call myself a “PC Modding Master”, I’m pretty confident in my ability to assemble a PC. Now that I’ve explained my skill level, I’ll admit that the concept of installing a custom water loop into a concept build worth over $1000 was a slightly daunting. Based on some of the emails and forum posts I’ve seen over the past few months, I wasn’t alone in my nervousness.
Water cooling used to be a clear sign of enthusiast ownership, then the lines were blurred with the self contained ‘closed loop’ coolers produced by Antec, Corsair, Cooler Master, Thermaltake and now Zalman among others. ‘Easy’ water cooling was available to the masses at last… but at the same time, I also noticed an increase in custom loop kits, parts, coolant and other water cooling components. It stands to reason that retailers expanding their ranges indicates an increase in the confidence of PC builders to water cool their builds. The price difference between an entry level custom kit like this one and the Corsair H100i is only around $15 higher at $165 online.
We reached out to the guys at XSPC and they came to the party with an early release sample of their Raystorm 750 EX240 water cooling kit. I’ll go into more detail on the components included shortly but essentially this water cooling kit made up of:
- an XSPC Raystorm CPU water block
- an X20 750 Black Bay Reservoir (dual 5.25″ bays) with pump
- an EX240 Dual Radiator
- a set of 120mm fans, tubing and everything you need to make it work except the coolant
image courtesy of xspc
The omission of coolant makes sense to us and could be for a number of reasons,
- the shelf life and storage implications of coolant are different to the rest of the kit
- coolant is a personal thing for enthusiasts, available in different colours and with a variety of additives
Make sure you check out our upcoming installation build log where we document each step of our installation of the XSPC Raystorm 750 EX240 into a Fractal Design Arc Midi R2 case.
In addition to the review kit supplied by XSPC, we also bought some XSPC LEDs in Green and UV along with some XSPC EC6 coolant.
Our idea was pretty simple – get the kit, follow the instructions, document the whole thing for you guys and tell you what we learned with some benchmarks to compare the XSPC Raystorm 750 EX240 against some popular air coolers. This review is a longer one but this one deserves thorough explanation so grab a coffee and settle in…
