Asetek shows next-gen VGA coolers

ASETEK IS ABOUT to launch several new lines of products taking them into new areas, specifically OEM sales. You can't do this without the right technology, and Asetek seems to have that down.

The most interesting bit is the low profile water block you see below. It is a standard liquid cooler but just thinner. If you put a low profile pump on top of it, you get the perfect cooler for small form factor (SFF) PCs.

Slim is beautiful

One of the bigger problems with those little beasts is that they are hard to get adequate airflow through. Anyone who has use a Dell 'toaster' SFF box knows what that is like, but large companies seem to buy them like they are going out of style. Asetek is trying to make them cooler and more efficient, but also a lot quieter.

Instead of the small, high-velocity fans drilling a hole in your skull, Asetek was showing off a SFF case that was virtually silent even with an Intel QX6850 in it. While water cooling does allow you to pack more wattage into the same area, the big win here is really sound.

Guess the cards

The same two factors, wattage and sound, hold true for video cards. The three you see here are for the upcoming generation of GPUs, and Asetek is NDA'd over them. This means they won't mention GT280 and 4870 out loud, and even covered the blanks with styrofoam.

A few things to note here, a single pump can cool two high-end GPUs, and there are two different radiators to chose from. Nova told you about the system that uses these blocks, the take home message is that you can cool 600+ watts on the big one, 300+ on the small with adequate fans on the radiator. The system shown off had multiple plates daisy-chained off one pump, with an Intel quad core @4.0GHz and 4GPUs all cooled in under 30db of noise.

One upcoming product that is not final yet is a new standard for cooling GPUs and related items. Every new GPU has a different board layout, and thus needs a different cold plate. The tooling gets expensive, and when you upgrade in a few months, your old one is a hefty chunk of garbage.

Asetek had the idea of modularising the whole setup. The result is a pump and waterblock with standard mounts on it. You buy this part once, and then get a blank with a new video card. The block's standard mounts bolt on to the blank and get your card cooled.

The idea is that there will be one standard interface for water cooling, and you can get any parts that meet this standard for mixing and matching. When you buy a new video card, you get an air cooled one or water cooled, and the water version plugs into the standard mount. You buy one pump and tubing setup, and that is hopefully good for a long time.

We wish Asetek well here, a little standardisation will go a long way in this market. A well thought-out standard will make life quite a bit easier for both enthusiasts and GPU engineers. µ