EKWB Is Having a Go at Professional Water Cooling

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.

EK-Pro Manifold (Image credit: EKWB)

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.

(Image credit: EKWB)

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.

(Image credit: EKWB)

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.

Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • Chargino
    I recently purchased cooling parts from EKWB and I'll NEVER do it again. Not only was there a nearly 25% charge to import the goods (tariff) that made them wildly uncompetitive, but many of the parts were defective. One 120mm fan wouldn't spin. Felt like it had sand in it, and all the 140mm fans are so poorly designed, they whack into the radiator when mounted in a pull configuration. One plastic quick disconnect leaked immediately after turning up the pump. Rather than continue to deal with this junk, I replaced the quick disconnect with a cheaper stainless steel unit from Koolance and bought properly engineered fans that don't ship DOA from Corsair. Be warned - if you live in the US -the tariffs are huge and the quality is junk. I now get to add their parts to a local landfill. Save yourself a lot of money and heartache and avoid them like the plague (or coronavirus).
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  • w_o_t_q
    Connectors are fine(bought more than once), good quality pumps, vents i will not buy from vendor due to fact it is not their specialty, if in short their specialty only products worth to buy. I live in EU so high import taxes are not issue, no point to buy in the US you have much better choices there.
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