Thursday, June 14th 2018
EKWB's R&D Team Shows New Concepts for PC Cooling
EKWB were full of updates at Computex this year, as seen in our other news post, but this did not stop them from unveiling wholly new concepts as it comes to the company. These are ideas that their R&D thinktank decided to explore beyond the norm, and first up is the creation of a new brand under the EK Special Projects (Spec) team that is tentatively named König, after their founder Eduard König. As we found out in person, Eddy has a passion for woodworking in addition to managing a company, and decided to combine the two. The new König brand intends to offer a personalized, made-to-order experience wherein they will work with the end user to design and manufacture products to match a lifestyle. This is currently built around solid wood of multiple varieties, three Slovenian version of which were shown at their suite, but they are open to working with other materials including carbon fiber, anodized aluminum, leather and so on. They shared some images of some example products as it pertains to watercooling (CPU block top covers, GPU blocks and backplate, fittings and so on) as well as modded cases with wooden panels as seen below. Be sure to also click on the story to read more on an entirely different concept from the company.Immersion cooling of PCs is not a new concept by itself, but it has been relegated to one-off modded builds at most. The principle of immersion cooling is fairly straightforward in using a medium that undergoes phase transition via absorption of heat from the hardware to be cooled, and this latent heat of evaporation is the path of heat transfer out of the hardware. The medium then is either replaced in volume, or also cooled separately via a radiator/condenser to allow a phase change back to the liquid phase which then allows for a more closed system. The medium has to be chosen such that its latent heat of evaporation coincides with the sensible heat taken from the PC hardware, and 3M Novec products is often used in this application. It just so happens that the 3M Novec range is extremely expensive when you can buy it, and in most cases is also a restricted item preventing the vast majority of users to purchase it. EKWB saw a market here, and worked on using a different medium which had an orange color to match the company logo (be it native or via a dye). A system was shown off at their suite as seen below, which makes use of a closed cycle two-phase immersion cooling setup using a radiator to cool the medium, and the goal of this concept is to release complete systems as the one seen below to retail market. Ideally, such a system would require minimal maintenance such that you would be well tired of the hardware being dated before you would have to do anything to the cooling solution. Note also the built-in display that is essentially a monitor already hooked to the system, and you can use it to do a variety of things- display important system parameters, be a digital photo frame, or just watch a video on it because why not? Time will tell how and when this comes to the masses, and it certainly has this editor's interest piqued.
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