EKWB's Pricey EK-FCW9100 Could Be Worth The Money
Can EKWB's pricey water block give you more performance-per-dollar than the stock cooler?
Professional workstation graphics cards are quite expensive, which is what makes EKWB’s latest water block announcement a little funny. While normally we’d consider a $160 water block an expensive upgrade for a graphics card, when you consider that the AMD FirePro W9100 costs around $4000, that $160 is actually a very small part of the overall cost and could be a good deal—good enough, in fact, that it might be preferable to use liquid cooling over stock air cooling from a price to performance ratio.
The EK-FCW9100 is EKWB’s latest, and it follows the standard recipe for a graphics water block in that it covers the GPU, memory and VRM circuitry and is made out of nickel-plated copper. It also has a high-flow design and brings the card profile down to a single-slot format.
So, why might using this water block on the FirePro W9100 will give you a better performance-per-dollar ratio? When we reviewed the W9100, one of the key problems we had with it was the cooler. It might perform better than the cooler on the gaming-oriented Hawaii cards, but that doesn’t mean that it’s ideal.
Replacing the stock cooler on a card like the W9100 with a more effective solution can improve performance so dramatically that dropping big money on a water loop and these water blocks could potentially give you enough performance-per-dollar to justify the high cost.
EKWB has made the EK-FCW9100 available for $161.32.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

you do know that this part of the block faces down right? you get a backplate if you want to "cover the ugly pcb"
this is also a pro card, not you ricer gaming "its faster because it looks cool" bs.
This is a major improvement over stock.
No one said anything about "OC workstation hardware".
They said one of the issues with the card was the cooler and being the fact most WS hardare is not overclock by the people that use them probably reffers to that the card was overheating by a cooler that cant perform. A cooler that cant perform means a card cant perform at it's max performance. A card that cant perform at is best is a waste of $$$ for a bussness that would be using these cards.
Also water cooling has more uses than "people wanting wide glow pipes in their flashy chassis."
Have you heard that even data centers have water cooling for there data racks?
Goolge uses it in many different ways:
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#water-and-cooling
And other data centers are moving to it as well.
so if data centers are moving to water cooling, then it has a purpose beyond being "flashy".
Reason why is that water transfers heat away better from the source than the air could do and water cooling can make coolers more compact so you have room for additional stuff (thus why an air cooler is typically bigger than a water cooler).
On top of switching over to water cooling and having more compact coolers, if ther motherboards allow it, you could add additional cards that would wouldn't had room for with air cooled cards.
Meaning a bussness that depends on gpu(s) to get there work done, could have more cards in 1 machine to get work done faster which it could be 1 job running on all gpu's or multiple jobs spread across the gpu's. Thus even more $$$ earned.
Either way, benefits for water cooled WS hardware can be seen over air.
Yup, read that correctly for the first time. It was asked generally for 780Ti or so.
No one said anything about "OC workstation hardware".
They said one of the issues with the card was the cooler and being the fact most WS hardare is not overclock by the people that use them probably reffers to that the card was overheating by a cooler that cant perform. A cooler that cant perform means a card cant perform at it's max performance. A card that cant perform at is best is a waste of $$$ for a bussness that would be using these cards.
Also water cooling has more uses than "people wanting wide glow pipes in their flashy chassis."
Have you heard that even data centers have water cooling for there data racks?
Goolge uses it in many different ways:
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#water-and-cooling
And other data centers are moving to it as well.
so if data centers are moving to water cooling, then it has a purpose beyond being "flashy".
blah...blah
Either way, benefits for water cooled WS hardware can be seen over air.
I say workstation you say one of the biggest dedicated data centre thumbs up man, it sure does relate. You shure should have 500 litre gas tanks in your cars because 18 wheelers do. WC is more efficient cooling solution but not and never in a single workstation or even single server rack solution. Where air cooling is suffcient and simply no-cost solution, water cooling require expertise, additional hardware, maitance time, and considerable additional purchase and setup cost in workstation and PC a like... making it only valid for OC afficionados. There is virtually no gains to be had in installing WC... unless you need it's higher cooling capacities.
Man oh man......
"I say workstation you say one of the biggest dedicated data centre thumbs up man, it sure does relate."
well when you say "seriously water cooling is used by people wanting wide glow-pipes in their flashy chassis. "
That makes your comment very narrow minded and makes it as though that people only use it for something fancy instead of having some functional use. Hence why I brought in the data center comment.
"WC is more efficient cooling solution but not and never in a single workstation or even single server rack solution."
While your agree on the cooling powers of water, where your wrong my freind is about it "never" being useful in a workstation or single server.
As the article stated, "When we reviewed the W9100, one of the key problems we had with it was the cooler".
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firepro-w9100-performance,3810-16.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firepro-w9100-performance,3810-17.html
Reading the review they link in the article, this card gets hot real quick and would perform better when under better cooling
"Where air cooling is suffcient and simply no-cost solution, water cooling require expertise, additional hardware, maitance time, and considerable additional purchase and setup cost in workstation and PC a like..."
Never argued those points about the maintance and it works for most setups but it doesn't work for all. Hence why this water block was made.
If there was no demand for it, they wouldn't be making it.
"making it only valid for OC afficionados. There is virtually no gains to be had in installing WC... unless you need it's higher cooling capacities."
No point? Well.... you look at the r9 290x (which this Fire Pro card mainly is).... and you know about how hot that card gets.... You get the picture now?
Were not talking about your low end workstation graphic card. We talking about top of the line card that has monster performance but generate a crap ton of heat and doesn't perform well when it running really hot.
You're also ignoring the block takes this down to a single slot card. This makes loading multiple cards in a single workstation much easier in mboard selection, cooling, and noise.