EK 275 Conquest
- Design
- Specs and pricing
- Servicing
- Upgradability
- Processor performance
- Gaming performance
- Software
- La nostra Take.
- Ci sono alternative?
- Quanto durerà?
- dovresti comprarlo?
MSRP $4,800.00
Score Details
DT Editors' Choice
“The EK 275 Conquest proves you don't need to spend big for quality custom watercooling.”
Professionisti
- Beautiful design and tasteful branding
- Clear filling instructions
- Blazing-fast gaming performance
- Clean cable management
- Cool and quiet
- Excellent support
CONS.
- Poor ray tracing performance
- Limited customization options
- Upgrades can be a hassle
Custom watercooling is the final frontier for PC enthusiasts, and EK wants to make it available to the masses. The EK Fluid Gaming 275 Conquest is a custom watercooled PC built with the best watercooling components you can buy, and its unbelievably low price helps it rank among the best gaming desktops.
Contenuti
- Design
- Specs and pricing
- Servicing
- Upgradability
- Processor performance
- Gaming performance
- Software
- Our take Mostra altri 3 articoli
Although the all-AMD Conquest isn’t cheap, it’s still as much as $1,500 less than the competition. Even better, it comes with the backing of EK’s massive catalog of watercooling products, allowing you dip your toes into the world of custom watercooling before you fully dive in.
Design
The 275 Conquest is a beautiful PC. The Lian Li PC-011 Dynamic it’s built inside is the best PC case you can buy, showing off the clean hardline tubing running throughout the machine. The 275 Conquest also has a distribution plate specifically designed for the case, which is washed in a sea of RGB.
EK also uses custom power supply cables for your 24-pin, 8-pin PCIe, and 8-pin CPU connectors, and they’re trained so that that none of the braided cables overlap each other. This is Falcon Northwest Talon levels of build quality, just without the massive premium.
EK has a little branding, but it’s all tasteful. The Lian Li badge that normally lives in the PC-011 Dynamic is replaced by an EK badge instead, and EK’s logo is etched into the top of the distribution plate.
One of the reasons the PC-011 Dynamic is a great PC case is that it offers a ton of room for cable management, and EK takes advantage of it. Even when you take off the back panel, there’s not a cable in sight. Everything is neatly tucked away, built with the attention to detail you’d have if you put together the PC yourself. That’s a lot more than machines like the MSI Aegis RS 12 can say.
The only complaint I can drum up is that the tubing runs to the GPU look like they’re at a slight angle. It’s so slight that you can’t notice it from most angles. I’m in awe with the EK 275 Conquest, not only because of the exceptional build quality, but also because EK doesn’t charge a massive premium for it.
Specs and pricing
Everything in the EK 275 Conquest is branded, much like the Origin Neuron. You know exactly what you get upfront, so you don’t have to worry about some custom motherboard or manufacturer-only memory causing problems with your system.
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 5900X |
|---|---|
| GPU | AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT |
| Motherboard | Asus Prime X570 Pro |
| Case | Lian Li PC-011 Dynamic |
| Memory | 32GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4-3200 |
| Storage | 1TB Seagate FireCuda 510, 4TB Seagate Barracuda |
| Power supply | EVGA 850W 80 Plus Gold |
| USB ports | 9x USB-A (7x rear, 2x front), 2x USB-C (1x rear, 1x front) |
| Networking | 1Gbit Ethernet |
For specs, the 275 Conquest is just below EK’s top Conquest model, which comes with a Ryzen 9 5950X. You can scale down to a Ryzen 5 5600X and RX 6700 XT for $2,500. EK offers its Vanquish line for Nvidia fans, though these machines run a few hundred dollars more than their AMD counterparts.
You don’t have a lot of options for configuration, unfortunately. Memory and storage are the only two areas you can customize, and EK doesn’t offer any options with Intel processors. EK offers several configurations for AMD and Nvidia, though, so you shouldn’t have any problems finding a machine that works.
For pricing, the 275 Conquest is a great value. If you were to buy everything on your own, you’d spend around $4,000. The 275 Conquest costs $4,800, but $800 is a pretty reasonable premium, especially considering the $4,000 price I quoted doesn’t include things acrylic tube cutters, much less a three-year warranty that covers leaks.
The value is even more clear when you bring in the competition. A similarly configured Maingear Vybe with a three-year warranty will run you $6,000, and it comes with a much worse case. That’s not to mention the pedigree EK has in the watercooling community, with a massive catalog of products to trick out, repair, and upgrade your build in the future. All things considered, $800 is a small price to pay.
Servicing
Custom watercooling requires maintenance, but it’s a lot less tedious than you might think. EK ships the 275 Conquest without fluid in the loop. There are rogue splotches of water in the loop from when EK tested the machine before sending it out, but you’ll need to fill the loop yourself with the included fluid.
The included instructions are easy to follow, and EK even has a video showing the process on its YouTube channel. Squirting water into a PC always feels unnatural, but EK offers through instructions so that even beginners won’t feel lost. You can have the loop moving in about 15 minutes.
EK doesn’t offer any resources beyond the initial fill, though. The only documentation I could find on maintenance is an FAQ that recommends draining and refilling the loop annually.
This doesn’t seem like negligence, just oversight. The included doc has instructions for draining the loop, and EK includes an extra drain tube. Simply noting that you should refill the loop annually on the included instructions would go a long way, so I hope EK does that in the future.
Upgradability
Upgradability is dicey on the 275 Conquest for two reasons: The custom loop makes upgrades tedious, and most major upgrades will void your warranty. The warranty bit is frustrating, but it makes sense; if you have to take apart the loop to make an upgrade, EK has no way of guaranteeing it’ll be put back together without leaks.
If you want to upgrade and still be covered, you can call EK for a quote. It will collect, upgrade, and return your PC to you. EK normally has products for the latest CPU and GPU launches, so if you want a shiny new graphics card down the line, there’s a good chance EK will be able to accommodate.
For PC builders who can handle the moisture, the 275 Conquest is fair game. You can buy everything in the system, all bits of the cooling loop included, on its own. You’ll need to set aside some time to plan and execute upgrades due to the custom loop, but EK doesn’t lock users with upgrade limitations like the Asus GA35DX does.
Processor performance
The heart of the EK 275 Conquest is the Ryzen 9 5900X. It’s a powerful 12-core processor that, up until recently, was only outclassed by AMD’s own Ryzen 9 5950X. The Conquest is an all-AMD system, which is a bit to its determent (at least before AMD reveals its Ryzen 7000 processors).
| EK 275 Conquest (Ryzen 9 5900X) | Maingear Vybe (Ryzen 9 5900X) | HP Omen 45L (Core i9-12900K)
---|---|---|---
Cinebench R23 multi-core | 20,361 | 20,802 | 23,068
Cinebench R23 single-core | 1,581 | 1,597 | 1,893
Geekbench 5 multi-core | 13,813 | 12,724 | 15,685
Geekbench 5 single-core | 1,629 | 1,718 | 1,910
PugetBench for Premiere Pro | 842 | 956 | 1,025
The Ryzen 9 5900X inside the 275 Conquest falls in line where I’d expect. Compared to the Maingear Vybe, which has the same processor, you can see almost identical single- and multi-core results in Cinebench and Geekbench. The HP Omen 45L is a more interesting point of comparison.
It comes with Intel’s Core i9-12900K, which universally outclasses the Ryzen 9 5900X. The multi-core improvements in Geekbench and Cinebench are impressive, but the single-core results stand out more. Intel is at the top of the stack when it comes to processor performance right now, and the EK only offers machines with AMD chips.
The RX 6900 XT is a sour point for creative pros, too. You can see how it lags behind the RTX 3080 Ti in the Maingear Vybe and the RTX 3090 in the HP Omen 45L in PugetBench. Despite the RX 6900 XT being an exceptionally powerful GPU, Nvidia still has the lead when it comes to creative apps. Thankfully, EK offers Nvidia cards if you want one.
Gaming performance
Processor performance may be disappointing, but the 275 Conquest is a hell of a gaming machine. The RX 6900 XT powering the graphics is obscenely powerful, matching or even exceeding the best that Nvidia has to offer. You can see my results at 4K with the highest-quality preset below.
| EK 275 Conquest (RX 6900 XT) | Maingear Vybe (RTX 3080 Ti) | HP Omen 45L (RTX 3090)
---|---|---|---
Forza Horizon 4 | 192 fps | 148 fps | 159 fps
Red Dead Redemption 2 | 76 fps | 76 fps | 76 fps
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | 68 fps | 64 fps | 66 fps
3DMark Time Spy | 19,492 | 17,160 | 18,523
3DMark Fire Strike | 39,307 | 35,088 | N / A
Fortnite | 80 fps | 82 fps | 82 fps
Cyberpunk 2077 non-RT | 43 fps | 38 fps | N / A
Cyberpunk 2077 RT w/ FSR | 42 fps | 38 fps | N / A
The HP Omen 45L comes with an RTX 3090, but the RX 6900 XT outclasses it. In every game but Fortnite, the RX 6900 XT managed a lead over Nvidia’s most powerful GPU. And those differences are significant in some cases, with the 275 Conquest outpacing the Omen 45L by nearly 21% in Forza Horizon 5.
Salire fino al RTX 3080 TI all'interno del Mainingar Vybe e le differenze si aprono ancora di più. Detto questo, ho visto alcuni limiti duri in alcuni titoli indipendentemente dal potere della GPU. Red Dead Redemption 2 è un buon esempio, con la stessa velocità media dei fotogrammi attraverso le tre GPU a 4K.
La RX 6900 XT è una grande GPU da gioco, ma ha una debolezza: Ray Tracing. Anche il RTX 3080 TI era più veloce del 46% in Cyberpunk 2077 con RAY Tracing acceso, nonostante sia a corto di rX 6900 XT con ray tracciamento spento. Puoi compensare con la risoluzione Super Risoluzione FidelityFX di AMD (FSR), ma non sembra grande.
Un grande vantaggio delle schede grafiche NVIDIA in questo momento è il profondo apprendimento del super campionamento (DLSS). È essenziale ottenere giochi di ray tracing giocabili, e sembra much meglio di FSR. La RX 6900 XT è la crema del raccolto, ma NVIDIA ha caratteristiche di piattaforma migliori al momento. E questo fa una grande differenza nei titoli come Cyberpunk 2077.
Tuttavia, sono estremamente soddisfatto delle prestazioni dei giochi della conquista 275. Se non fosse per la performance di tracciamento dei poveri Ray, la RX 6900 XT sarebbe la migliore scheda grafica sul mercato, nessuna domanda. La buona notizia è che la maggior parte dei giochi non ha Ray Tracing, e se vuoi accenderlo, FSR può ancora migliorare le tue prestazioni.
Software
Non sorprende a malapena a dare quanto altrimenti la conquista 275 abbia ragione, ma la macchina non viene caricata con Bloatware. Tutto quello che è installato fuori dalla scatola è AMD Ryzen Master e Asus Armery Crate - entrambe le utility essenziali per i componenti all'interno.
La macchina viene anche caricata con Windows 10, che sono un fan di. Windows 11 è ancora molto nuovo e molti giocatori di PC preferiscono Windows 10 per la stabilità. Questa macchina è completamente compatibile con Windows 11, tuttavia, quindi puoi aggiornare gratuitamente se vuoi.
La nostra Take.
La conquista EK 275 gestisce un'eccezionale qualità costruttiva, gravidanza straordinarie e temperature fredde per un prezzo che è quasi troppo bello per essere vero. Se vuoi un watercooling personalizzato e non vuoi che il seccatura, EK Fluid Gaming sia la tua migliore opzi1. Qualsiasi altra cosa sta perdendo efficacemente denaro.
Ci sono alternative?
Sì, ma la maggior parte di loro sono più costosi:
- $ 6.000 Maingear Vybe - molto più costoso e viene fornito con un caso peggiore, ma Mainingar offre più opzioni di personalizzazione.
- Genesi di origine di $ 5,000 - significativamente più grande e più costosa, e non includeva una GPU oolerata dall'acqua. Ci sono più opzioni di personalizzazione, tuttavia.
Quanto durerà?
È necessario scaricare e ricaricare la conquista EK 275 almeno una volta all'anno, ma finché lo fai, può durare per molto tempo. Gli aggiornamenti sono possibili, sebbene possano non essere pratici se non si desidera sporcarsi le mani con il watercooling personalizzato.
dovresti comprarlo?
Sì. La conquista EK 275 è eccezionalmente ben costruita, ed è molto più economico della concorrenza. Utilizza anche parti EK per il watercooling, che hanno un massiccio pedigree nella comunità.
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