A few days ago EK, well-known maker of custom water-cooling products, released several new terminals and two of these are of particular interest to SFF enthusiasts looking to build a custom loop in a small chassis.
The first of these is the EK-FC Terminal Angled (pictured above). This will be useful for single-card builds where for whatever reason the tubing can’t be vertically like normal.
Of more interest to me is the following:
It’s not much to look at but this is the EK-FC Terminal DUAL Parallel 1-Slot and it allows two single-slot blocks to be used next to each other. This is currently a very niche application, mostly being of use to microATX boards that have two PCIe slots side by side (typically slots 3 and 4).
But with the use of either a PCIe splitter or a Mini-DTX motherboard, this terminal becomes especially interesting for SFF multi-GPU setups. Mini-DTX is basically a Mini-ITX board that is slightly extended in order to fit a second expansion slot and a few boards exist in the form factor but none have the dual x16 slots that would make this terminal useful. Instead, there has been some experimentation within the SFF community with PCIe splitters to accomplish the same thing.
The problem with either of those setups is that it requires use of single-slot cards to fit and connecting two blocked cards was problematic before but now it should be relatively straightforward with this new terminal.
The new parts are available from EK’s webshop. The angled terminal is $18 and the dual single-slot terminal is $23 in acetal and $29.50 in plexi.
Thanks to user QinX in the forums for the heads up! Original press release here.
Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum here.
