AMD R9 Fury X to be affected by Asetek lawsuit

AMD R9 Fury X to be affected by Asetek lawsuit

 

Over the past number of year Asetek has been hunting down all of those who would infringe on their liquid cooling patents, having already successfully taken a large number of all in one liquid coolers out of the US market, most notably Swiftech’s H220 liquid cooler. 

In a very recent case against Cooler Master for their use of a coldplate mounted liquid cooling loop, a patented Asetek design, Cooler Master was told by a US district court jury that they must pay a 14.5% damages fee on all Cooler Master Liquid coolers already sold in the US and must cease shipping the infringing products. 

Cooler Master demanded that a new trail be carried out and that a judgement be made a matter of law by a Judge, and was met by an increased damages fee of  25.375% for products which have already been shipped, which will affect all infringing products sold beginning January 1st. Cooler Master still have the ability to appeal this decision. 

 

 

Right now this ruling will affect a wide range of products which includes the following cooler Master all-in-one liquid coolers, as listed by Gamersnexus.

• – Seidon 120V
• – Seidon 120V Plus
• – Seidon 120M
• – Seidon 120XL
• – Nepton 140XL
• – Seidon 240M
• – Glacer 240L
• – Nepton 280L

 

Right now it is not entirely clear what additional products will be affected by this court ruling, but it is worth noting that AMD’s R9 Fury X is cooler is a Cooler Master made all-in-one Liquid cooler that uses a cold plate mounted design. 

If the Cooler Master cooler used in AMD’s R9 Fury X GPU is affected by this lawsuit it will not be able to be shipped by Cooler Master any more in the US, meaning that AMD will have a difficult time creating more of the GPU. Perhaps this may force AMD to adope a new reference design for the GPU, but right now we can only guess as to what that would be.  

This places a dangerous precedent on the PC industry as many other companies have created their own all-in-one water cooling products and any of those that similar to Asetek’s design may meet the same fate as Cooler Master if they are selling in the US or EU markets. 

You can join the discussion on Asetek’s victory against Cooler Master on the OC3D Forums.