Asetek founder and CEO André Eriksen started a blog at Asetek website a while back, where he has started off by explaining what happened to Asetek, why Asetek all of a sudden disappeared from the retail market, more or less at least. Asetek was a leading innovator when it came to water and phase change cooling. If you missed part one, we encourage you to go back and give it a glance before reading part two. Part two covers what happened after Asetek decided that the retail market was not the best way to go.
After getting the support from venture capitalist, the development of the Low Cost Liquid Cooling (LCLC) started, even though the foundation of the LCLC dates way back. Most of all, Asetek needed to build a more professional supply chain. They reorganized and restructured.
The OEM product cycle is a lot different from retail products. The latter is a lot shorter, while an OEM product has to last up to six or seven years. For water cooling, that’s close to eternity. An OEM product has to be a complete unit, no parts, and at the same time the product has to be extremely durable and resistant to a wide range of temperatures, from very low to very high.
In response to the quality which was questioned a while back, Eriksen writes;
“Of course we could have chosen pink garden hose, gold fish in the liquid, a propeller in a transparent plastic house and gold plated cold plate – and although this is considered to look cool in distant parts of the world, such hoses just have a huge liquid loss, and the liquid will simply evaporate through them in no time (no time in this context could be 1-2 years). That is OK in an DIY system, where you regularely [sic] flush your system and refill, but not in an OEM PC. The tubing in the LCLC is one of the most expensive parts in the system, and is made of a material in the “Teflon-family” so please do not assume it low quality just because it does not look like Las Vegas.”
If anything, reviews have shown that the quality of the unit is superb, and nothing else. At the same time, LCLC is one unit, just a single device you need to install. Perfect for an OEM assembly line. The priorities of an OEM like Dell is very different from an enthusiast consumer, while the enthusiast wants performance, performance and performance, Dell wants high reliability, cost efficiency and a long life expectancy.
Eriksen goes on to explain Asetek’s new approach and that they have great faith in LCLC, using the HP Blackbird as the example.
