First Watercooling Loop

Kits vs Custom vs exandable AIOs

There are money savings to be had when you buy a water cooling kit or an expandable AIO system. However there are tradeoffs too. The choice of components may not be what you want and so you may end up replacing parts with the pricier ones anyway and thus end up spending more money than if you’d done it right the first time. My first delve into water cooling was the XSPC Rasa 750 kit. It contained the Rasa waterblock which had poor performance, the 750 pump/reservoir which had poor performance, some fans which were not what I wanted, some tube that turned brown very quickly, and some ugly barbs. The pump died within the year, the tube was tossed in a month and not one piece of the kit was in use 18 months later. However there are now better kits with better components, I would suggest researching what you can afford for a custom loop within your budget and then compare to the available kits to see if the compromise on a kit is worth it.

Most all in one “liquid cooling” systems are not expandable. The only one that is expandable is the Swiftech H220x, which can be considered a compact pre-assembled water cooling kit effectively. This is nice, but if you like that it’s pre-assembled then I’d be cautious of water cooling in general!