Slovenia-based EKWB announced Wednesday its professional line of water cooling products, starting out with a pair of manifolds and some EK-Pro Quick Disconnect kits.
Being aimed at professionals, EK's new line is completely different from its high-end consumer products. Whereas the consumer gear prioritizes looks, performance and, often, RGB lighting, the EK Professional Line is built for reliability and serviceability. Consequently, the company has abandoned RGB and transparent tubing for its EK-Pro products.
In terms of serviceability, EKWB is hoping customers purchase one of the manifolds along with a heap of the quick-disconnect couplings, and we understand why. The manifold can be placed in a very accessible location in front of the motherboard, and it distributes the fluid across either four or six devices, depending on the variant you pick.
The idea is that you connect your CPUs and GPUs up to the manifold with tubing that has the quick-disconnect couplings fitted at the manifold side. This is so you can easily uninstall a GPU without needing to drain and disassemble the cooling loop, making the system much more serviceable. With the manifolds pushing fluid in parallel or semi-parallel setups, you also won't need to loop the disconnected GPU through as you would in a loop that has all the devices connected in series.
The manifolds come by themselves as either the EK-Pro Manifold 2CPU 2GPU or the EK-Pro Manifold 2CPU 4GPU for $80 or $99.90, respectively.
The EK-Pro CPU and GPU Quick Disconnect kits come complete with 1m of tubing, two barb fittings with clamps for the GPU or CPU side and two sets of quick-disconnect fittings for on the manifold side. The GPU side uses thinner 6mm tubing instead of a 10mm outer diameter but comes with a 45-degree angled GPU terminal. These kits retail for $99.99.