Today appears to be a very sad day for graphics card enthusiasts as Asetek have patented a liquid cooling system for graphics cards. The patent, which will apply in the USA, has the potential to force custom GPU water-block vendors out of the GPU market from what I can see. The likes of EKWB, Koolance and Aquacool may be forced to move production outside the USA and stop selling to the American market in a similar way Swiftech had to when Asetek raised litigation claims against them for patent violations of the AIO CPU cooler design. It is not yet specifically known if the Asetek patent applies to all-in-one liquid cooling solutions for GPUs or whether it applies to all liquid cooling solutions for GPUs so we will be working to get clarification on this. Asetek claim to have been granted a patent by the USPTO on their “Thermal interposer liquid cooling system designed for cooling graphic processing units (GPUs)”. Unsurprisingly Asetek were delighted about the USPTO decision, making the following statement:
“As seen in the recently announced AMD Radeon R9 295X2, the graphics cooling market is one that we see as having tremendous growth potential for our desktop business,” said André Sloth Eriksen, Founder and CEO of Asetek. “We continue to see increasing interest from GPU and graphics card manufacturers due to increased power use and demands for lower acoustics. Given this interest, it is possible that the GPU cooling business could rival our CPU cooling business in the coming years.”
Source: Techpowerup
Image courtesy of Asetek
smart move but a dirty move .. what about all older coolers if companies cant make them anymore will they support them ??