A new dimension of cooling – EK launches its first actively cooled GPU backplates

To cool modern graphics cards as efficiently as possible, EK has started to think outside of the box, revealing a new liquid cooling solution that adds a whole new dimension to the company’s liquid cooling capabilities. Instead of simply plonking a liquid cooling water block on the top of a graphics card, what would happen if you also placed a water block on its rear? Double-sided water cooling? That’s the basic idea behind EK’s new RTX 3080/RTX 3090 Active Backplates. 

At OC3D, we have tested and reviewed an uncountable number of graphics cards. We know what it is like to almost burn your hand on the rear PCB of a recently benchmarked GPU and have seen the benefits of directing airflow to the rear of a GPU’s PCB while overclocking. This active backplate solution is the kind of innovation that has kept EK as one of the world’s premier liquid cooling brands for the past decade; it is this kind of design that will continue to differentiate their designs from their peers. 

EK’s new Quantum RTX 3080/3090 (Reference, not Founders Edition) Active Backplate is designed to compliment EK’s existing EK Quantum Vector RE RTX 3080/3090 water block, allowing the graphics card’s core, memory and power phased to be cooled from two sides. This design will allow supported graphics cards to be more efficiently cooled, which is great news for RTX 30 series overclockers. 

Sandwiching a graphics card between two water blocks also has some neat side-benefits, such as increased GPU sturdiness and decreased GPU sag. At CES 2021, EK also stated that the thermal pads at the rear of supported graphics cards would also act as vibration dampeners that counter coil whine.