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CES might be over, but our coverage from the event continues. TechPowerUp prides itself on visiting a lot of brands, big and small, and bringing to you our first-hand account of everything new. EK Waterblocks, or simply EKWB henceforth, had a large room in the Mandalay Bay with a big open window spanning the room, which made for challenging photography, but a well-laid out open plan made it easy for us to go over the various product segments they had to display. This post will go briefly over them, but keep in mind that nearly all products showcased do not have set retail availability info just yet.
The very first thing that caught our eyes was their new line of AIO cooling solutions, now simply called EK-AIO. These are the successors to the EK-MLC Phoenix, and the EK-Predator from before, both of which did not really change the status quo of the pre-filled AIO CPU cooling market. EK hopes that the new series, of which again they are working to finalizing the design before committing to a release window and pricing information, will change this. As with most of their new products, the EK-AIO coolers integrate RGB support with 9 dRGB LEDs in the pump/block and more on the EK-Vardar RGB fans that are used on the radiator itself. The EK-AIO series is planned to come in 120/240/360 mm radiator size options, with 1/2/3 fans respectively. Read past the break for more from the Slovenian watercooling brand.
Representing EK's Quantum lineup of products were the recently launched Kinetic series of flat and tube reservoirs (FLT and TBE, respectively). It was our first time seeing them in person but more interesting was the coolant used inside which, as EK says, will be a new retail solution coming soon. This was being marketed as an RGB-specific coolant, which is effectively a more dilute version of their CryoFuel Solid premixes to allow for more light through for a diffused, uniform effect while still being concentrated enough to retain antibacterial and anti-corrosive properties within the stated lifetime. As such, we can on paper make this ourselves, but EK wants to take the guesswork out of the equation while also keeping product warranty intact for those who want to keep it simple.
EKWB first showed off their upcoming EK-Magnitude flagship CPU block at Computex last year, with a strong aim to outperform all other blocks, including their own EK-Velocity and EK-Supremacy Classic. The EK-Magnitude has gone through several revisions and updates to the cooling engine since, and is finally finished to where the company said they plan to bring it out next month. They showed off some of the various different permutations of top, cold plate, bracket, and socket compatibility at CES, including the AMD Ryzen-optimized cooling engine to better take advantage of the multi-chip geometry employed by the Red team.
Distribution plates, or distro plates as more commonly called, went from being a one-off modder design to a commercial product in 2019, and the trend seems to continue in 2020. Despite these being highly niche products selling an order of magnitude or more fewer than a typical reservoir, EKWB has decided there is enough of a market to warrant more of their branded solution for cases including the Phanteks Evolve X, the Fractal Design Define R6, and the Corsair Obsidian 1000D. Part of their EK-Quantum Reflection series, these distro plates do exactly what you think and have pre-configured channels to allow for easier parallel hard tube layouts, especially with their own water blocks. These distro plates come with a pre-installed D5 pump, except for the last one for that behemoth Obsidian 1000D that features two D5 pumps and two separate channel sets to use with the two systems in the case that EK expects buyers of this product would have. This particular distro plate might well cost over $400 when it is out, which is close to the cost of the case itself!
EKWB's OEM side took up the final step on the tour, with a demo system from Cubix Corporation showing off their enterprise solutions in the form of a co-developed cooling solution involving aluminium water blocks and manifolds using quick connect fittings. Using a dual-socket Supermicro board, this particular workstation uses five watercooled GPUs, including a quadro and four RTX 2080 Ti cards at PCIe Gen 3x16 each and up to a whopping 4 TB of RAM. Other products on display were their FLAT PC series products for autonomous driving vehicles, automotive grade AIOs, and 1u server CPU blocks which we saw before already.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
The very first thing that caught our eyes was their new line of AIO cooling solutions, now simply called EK-AIO. These are the successors to the EK-MLC Phoenix, and the EK-Predator from before, both of which did not really change the status quo of the pre-filled AIO CPU cooling market. EK hopes that the new series, of which again they are working to finalizing the design before committing to a release window and pricing information, will change this. As with most of their new products, the EK-AIO coolers integrate RGB support with 9 dRGB LEDs in the pump/block and more on the EK-Vardar RGB fans that are used on the radiator itself. The EK-AIO series is planned to come in 120/240/360 mm radiator size options, with 1/2/3 fans respectively. Read past the break for more from the Slovenian watercooling brand.
Representing EK's Quantum lineup of products were the recently launched Kinetic series of flat and tube reservoirs (FLT and TBE, respectively). It was our first time seeing them in person but more interesting was the coolant used inside which, as EK says, will be a new retail solution coming soon. This was being marketed as an RGB-specific coolant, which is effectively a more dilute version of their CryoFuel Solid premixes to allow for more light through for a diffused, uniform effect while still being concentrated enough to retain antibacterial and anti-corrosive properties within the stated lifetime. As such, we can on paper make this ourselves, but EK wants to take the guesswork out of the equation while also keeping product warranty intact for those who want to keep it simple.
EKWB first showed off their upcoming EK-Magnitude flagship CPU block at Computex last year, with a strong aim to outperform all other blocks, including their own EK-Velocity and EK-Supremacy Classic. The EK-Magnitude has gone through several revisions and updates to the cooling engine since, and is finally finished to where the company said they plan to bring it out next month. They showed off some of the various different permutations of top, cold plate, bracket, and socket compatibility at CES, including the AMD Ryzen-optimized cooling engine to better take advantage of the multi-chip geometry employed by the Red team.
Distribution plates, or distro plates as more commonly called, went from being a one-off modder design to a commercial product in 2019, and the trend seems to continue in 2020. Despite these being highly niche products selling an order of magnitude or more fewer than a typical reservoir, EKWB has decided there is enough of a market to warrant more of their branded solution for cases including the Phanteks Evolve X, the Fractal Design Define R6, and the Corsair Obsidian 1000D. Part of their EK-Quantum Reflection series, these distro plates do exactly what you think and have pre-configured channels to allow for easier parallel hard tube layouts, especially with their own water blocks. These distro plates come with a pre-installed D5 pump, except for the last one for that behemoth Obsidian 1000D that features two D5 pumps and two separate channel sets to use with the two systems in the case that EK expects buyers of this product would have. This particular distro plate might well cost over $400 when it is out, which is close to the cost of the case itself!
EKWB's OEM side took up the final step on the tour, with a demo system from Cubix Corporation showing off their enterprise solutions in the form of a co-developed cooling solution involving aluminium water blocks and manifolds using quick connect fittings. Using a dual-socket Supermicro board, this particular workstation uses five watercooled GPUs, including a quadro and four RTX 2080 Ti cards at PCIe Gen 3x16 each and up to a whopping 4 TB of RAM. Other products on display were their FLAT PC series products for autonomous driving vehicles, automotive grade AIOs, and 1u server CPU blocks which we saw before already.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
