EK has been busy these past few days. It announced the Vector series waterblock for the Radeon VII and shortly before that custom watercooling solutions for NVIDIA’s top-end GeForce RTX cards. The new AC waterblocks for the RTX cards are made of aluminum instead of copper which brings down the costs but the cooling performance is adversely affected as well.
Just like all other major offerings, the EK AC block cools all the major components of the RTX cards from the GPU to VRMs as well as the memory. In case you weren’t aware, water is circulated directly over these components and in the process, it takes away part of the heat generated. If you want the lowest temperatures with maximum overclocks, then you should look elsewhere. EK’s AC lineup has the bare-bones waterblocks for people who don’t want to spend more on them than the rest of the major components. Despite that, however, RGB lighting isn’t missing with sync support for all major motherboard manufacturers including (but not limited to) Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion, Asus Aura Sync, and MSI Mystic Light.
There is one important bit you need to keep in mind if you are considering buying one of these. All the parts that you’ll use for the loop need to be made of aluminum. If somewhere in between you push in a copper part, it might result in corrosion of the aluminum. Aluminum is quite susceptible to galvanic corrosion when in contact with copper via an electrolyte which in this case will be the circulating fluid.
As per EK, the AC waterblocks for the GeForce RTX cards will be exclusively available through Newegg in the US while OCUK will be the official distributor in the UK. As for pricing, the aluminum-based EK-AC GeForce RTX block costs $110 while the higher-end EK-Vector Nickel + Plexi block is priced at $160. You can find more info at EK’s official website here.
