EK Thermosphere

Price – $74-77 + Mounting brackets ($8 each)

The EK Thermosphere replaced the EK Supremacy VGA and got rid of the more basic cooling style of the base in favor of a jetplate. Jetplates increase local flow rates while also conveniently centering the fresh cooler liquid on the die. They do however have side effects like increasing the overall block restriction. Packaging was good as usual from EK:

Accessories, TIM and instructions:

It should be noted that at this point we found out that the Thermosphere has a replaceable mounting bracket that makes mounting the block extremely easy and worry free:

The downside is that there is only on plate included and that only supports recent Nvidia cards. For our R9-290 we had to replace the mounting plate with the R600 one which is sold for $8. This is not the end of the world, but if you forget to buy it and then need to pay for a second round of shipping then the extra cost goes up considerably for a block that is not that cheap anyway.

The block however is attractive in the nickel version (both plexi/acetal/copper/nickel versions are available). The plexi/copper version doesn’t look as good because there is a stainless steel plate used in the construction that blends in with nickel, but not with copper.

The other part to consider is the bridge. This is designed to stick out from the card in the way that a full cover block would:

However this means that it will not be compatible with cards that are taller, such as some of the extreme versions of GPUs designed for sub-zero benching such as Asus’s Matrix, MSI’s Lightning or EVGA’s Classified. EK mentioned that an extended bridge may be launched to increase compatability, but this has not yet happened.

So this is truly less universal than the old Supremacy VGA block and ~$20 more costly, however despite that the mounting system makes the block a joy to mount. It truly is the easiest block to mount because there are only four screws, and the block is stable due to the use of standoffs and can be held in position easily during the mounting procedure. Nor is there any concern of over tightening and breaking the GPU as the bracket is designed to be the correct offset for the GPU. The bridge also makes attaching fittings easier or even allows the use multi GPU bridges.