If you’ve been reading rumors about the high power consumption of Nvidia’s upcoming Ampere graphics cards (which we’re still referring to as the RTX 3000 series until Nvidia tells us otherwise) with a certain amount of trepidation, you may be relieved to know that EK Water Blocks has confirmed it will be creating water blocks, to allow the GPUs to be hooked up to liquid cooling kits, “ready at or close to launch.”
This means if you use liquid cooling in your PC and are hoping to get the new Nvidia RTX 3080, for example, you should be able to install it in your PC straight away.
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The news comes from EK Water Block’s Facebook page (as reported by Videocardz), which was responding to customers’ questions about how long they’ll have to wait for its water blocks to be available for Nvidia’s new cards. The good news is that it shouldn’t be long.
The fact that the company has already been building water blocks for the upcoming GPUs means that Nvidia must be very close to announcing and releasing them. The company has a big online event planned for September 1, and it’s widely expected that Nvidia will announce its next-gen GPUs then.
Keeping cool
Water blocks for GPUs allow PC builders to hook up graphics cards to their liquid cooling setups, which offer advanced cooling compared to the fans and heatsinks they are sold with.
Because you have to remove the attached cooling before adding the water block – and then connecting it up to your existing liquid cooling system – these are usually aimed at enthusiasts. They are quite pricey as well – the EK-Vector GPU water block for current generation RTX GPUs costs $134.99 (around £100/AU$190).
However, with news that Nvidia’s upcoming GPUs could require a serious amount of power to run – and therefore generate a lot of heat – means many people may be looking at more advanced ways of keeping these new GPUs cool.
While we’re sure that Nvidia will ship its new GPUs with coolers that are able to keep the cards from overheating (usually in the form of a couple of fans), for people looking to eke out every last drop of performance from these cards with a hefty cooling solution, it looks like EKWB will have you sorted as soon as these GPUs launch.
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