EK makes exclusive factory fitted waterblocks for Ares, Hydrocopper and HOF Cards!

There was some big news in the world of watercooling this week as both EVGA, Asus and Galaxy announced high end cards fitted with EK waterblocks from the factory.  EVGA who for the longest time had partnered with Swiftech to produce water blocks have switched to using EK:

The waterblock in question looks like it is the standard plexi nickel titan waterblock but with the black shroud added on top to “evga” it up.  As with the regular EK aftermarket block the card can have the pcie backplate swapped to become a 2 slot card rather than a 3 slotter.  We still think it’s silly to buy this particular card but we are excited that EK and EVGA have partnered up.  EVGA have not mentioned the reason for switching suppliers from Swiftech but if we were to guess it would be combination of slow development time (Swiftech only just released it’s R9-290 block nearly 7 months after the GPU became available), Swiftech undercutting the Titan Hydrocopper with it’s own cheaper Komodo block and price (Swiftech were usually one of the most expensive blocks before EVGA added on their cut).

Asus had ventured towards water cooling with dual purpose hybrid air or water cooling heatsinks for some of their motherboards (max v formula) and it’s posiedon cooler on some of the more recent GPUs.  However with the 295×2 moving to an “all in one” sealed type liquid cooling system similar to the one used in the ARES II, Asus have upped their game by offering the card only with a beautiful custom EK waterblock fitted as standard:

We have always been fans of the ARES cards and this is no let down.  Though it has to be said Asus should have copied L3P’s custom Mars II block design which was just perfect!  Although we don’t know the clocks or output port details we can see that this is a single slot card and we also know that there will only be 500 produced.  PLEASE PLEASE ASUS SEND US ONE!

In addition this morning at Computex Galaxy had a galaxy/EK branded block on their HOF card – EK have made blocks for the HOF cards before but they were aftermarket. Now they will be fitted and the factory which is why they now feature the Galaxy logo more prominently.

While all of this is is surprising simply because all were announced so close together EK had already been working working with other GPU manufacturer’s to sell pre-blocked cards such as the Powercool PCS series:

So this is a natural progression, but the sheer scale is what is most surprising. Given EK’s support of many non-reference GPUs we would not be surprised to see more announcements as we continue through Computex and we’d expect some of the other waterblock manufacturers to be feeling a bit scared right now!