CoolerMaster isn’t the only company potentially caught by this issue, but it provides cooling solutions to a number of companies, including Gigabyte and AMD. The company has been slugged with a hefty fine for violating Asetek’s patent, and must pay Asetek a 23.375% royalty rate on all infringing products sold since January 1, 2015. Now, GamerNexus reports that Asetek has sent cease-and-desist letters to both Gigabyte and AMD, demanding that the manufacturers cease selling the WaterForce brand of GTX 980 products and the Fury X, respectively.
... according to a report from GamersNexus, both AMD and Gigabyte have received cease-and-desist letters from Asetek regarding the liquid coolers they use on their graphics cards.
AMD responded over the weekend:
“We are aware that Asetek has sued Cooler Master. While we defer to Cooler Master regarding the details of the litigation, we understand that the jury in that case did not find that the Cooler Master heat sink currently used with the Radeon Fury X infringed any of Asetek’s patents.”
If you think it's necessary. I wanted to expand on the information now that more has come to light, and also post into a more traveled portion of the forum (i.e. Community).
In August 2014, AMD and Asetek struck a deal for the next generation liquid cooled graphics cards: source.
Apparently AMD decided to not honor that deal, dumped Asetek and went ahead with an unlicensed Cooler Master design (that infringes on the Asetek patent): source.
Of course now everyone might blame Asetek for being a "patent troll" but in this situation this might be unwarranted, Asetek actively uses their designs in their own products (they even have high density server products) and in the design of a lot of licensed partner's products. The patent isn't your average "rectangle with rounded corners" deal either. So trolling doesn't really apply.
I don't know what Gigabyte was thinking, but they won't really be affected financially too much by this, the "Water Force" models are a "limited edition" design and they don't sell as much of them as you might think.
He posted 9 hours ago. I posted in his to kinda connect the two, and provide the bridge across the two sub-forums so nobody misses any info in case they wanted it.
@anarekist Usually yes, I would blame it all on Cooler Master. And Cooler Master could take all the blame if they wanted to. But taking into consideration the fact that AMD and Asetek were in the middle of a deal, and AMD suddenly switches to Cooler Master, it's hard to believe that the fact that this is patented technology was not known to everyone.
So neither AMD, or Gigabyte for that matter, can claim "we didn't know".
It's a bit fishy, and I think AMD will have to pay, because the cooling system is integrated into the product (the actual video card, as a required sub-component) and they are not sold as an "accessory". As for Gigabyte, too bad for them, the situation is very similar.
Now, I'm usually against the Patent System, because it is broken and it allows certain companies to take advantage of sometimes very vague patents. But I do think that if a patent is sufficiently descriptive and the company that owns that patent is actually using the designs in products, they should have the right to do what Asetek does now.
My favorite comment from reading through articles on the issue:
I think AMD should decide that they no longer give any f*cks, and rip Asetek a new one in the press. Imagine, if you will:
8 December 2015 - AMD is announcing a temporary suspension of sales of their R9 Fury X graphics cards, after a Cease and Desist order was filed against them by Asetek, alleging that the closed-loop water cooling unit on the Fury X infringes on Asetek's patents.
"Effective immediately, and in compliance with a Cease and Desist order from Asetek, AMD is freezing sales of Fury X graphics card products until a suitable replacement liquid cooler is found," said an AMD spokesman. "We feel this is better for us, anyway - the Asetek-patented units were total garbage. They were a loud, high-pitched, screaming mess, as most of the initial reviews noted when the Fury X lineup originally released. It's a problem we'd been fighting ever since, and it's a problem we can't fix, because it's due entirely to the really poor, Asetek-patented design of the pump. Now that Asetek is forcing us to stop using it, we have a chance to toss their terrible and noisy and unreliable pumps and put in something that actually works."
It's shitting on Asetek because Asetek claims Cooler Master is using their patent.
"According to Asetek, and according to the courts that agreed with Asetek, it's not a CoolerMaster unit, it's an Asetek design that CMI is passing off as a CoolerMaster design. Asetek took CMI to court claiming that CMI was using Asetek's design without license. So, according to Asetek and American patent law, it's an Asetek design. Therefore, AMD wouldn't be saying anything untrue at all by saying that the Asetek design is crap, and pointing out the dozens of reviews of the Fury X that all noted that the pumps screamed very loudly and that this problem had a very detrimental effect on their product."
I wish AMD went with a air cooler with the Fury X. like the old triple fan design on the 7990. that would of been great for the Fury X or the 290x back when they were thinking about stock coolers.
I really would like to see the patent. The patent-system was a great idea in the beginning (when steam engines went on to power the world). But by now, anything from single words to contraptions making use of other patents can be patented. Maybe somone will dig up patents for a pump design that uses a rotating disk to move water. Someone put a pump on top of a piece of copper, someone else had the same idea but a little more succesful. Now both sides are pumping money into a bubble GREAT IDEA! Why inovate when you can just use courts as ATMs...?
Well, there's the design and the implementation of the design. You can have two implementations of the same design and one can be perfect while the other can be an absolute piece of... something.
You can always see this, the original product and the cheap chinese knock-off. Take for example Cherry MX switches, for which the patent expired recently. The ones made in Germany that many swear by, and the recent explosion of chinese copies that seem to be of questionable quality.
Honestly the card sits no longer than 8" once the tubing is taken into account. If they air cooled it we'd be looking at yet another 12" AMD card to add to the list of "ridiculously long cards that hardly fit in your case." And truthfully, you may hate the way it looks but the function is stellar. It's the coolest running flagship GPU since we moved away from render pipelines, and it's the shortest too. (If you don't count the Nano now, which is itself a flagship.)
The problem with that is the "message". The marketing team wouldn't have been able to underline the advantages of HBM if the card was 12" long. Having a really powerful card this small keeps the conversation going further then it could go otherwise.
Also, we all remember the reference design of the GTX 670. People took that the wrong way. These days a GTX 970 has basically the same design of the 670, but they added extra PCB that sits there for nothing, because "marketing".
