Gadgetory

swift tech school IT Coolermaster and AMD have all attracted the legal ire of liquid cooling supplier ace attack who hold two relevant patents to liquid cooler designs specifically pertaining to closed-loop or all-in-one liquid cooler design and we recently posted a few exclusive stories about this including an update on a syntax current posturing against AMD ace tech issued a cease and desist order to am the demanding that the sale of the RN I in fury X halt immediately they also issued a CMD to gigabyte over the GTX 980 water force card using a closed-loop liquid cooler for its thermal dissipation as well and this video should serve as a means to recap everyone on the history to this point talk about what those patents mean what they protect intellectually and cover the whole history of legal action between ASA tech Kuwaiti Coolermaster what looks to be AMD in the future it's all it's very intriguing to follow and there's a lot of history behind this specific segment of the industry so that's what we're here to talk about today the lawsuits in C and D orders have been going on for years now with asa tech successfully knocking swift x h2 20 out of the US market in 2013 winning a banishment on CMI USA liquid cooling products from the u.s. marketplace and receiving settlements from its ELC competitor cool IT but who is ASA Tech and what is the history of these legal matters leading to today's news asa Tech is a liquid cooling supplier or om Original Equipment Manufacturer and it is their job to supply a finished product to the manufacturers with which you were all familiar that would include Corsair actively making several of the coolers for them NZXT with the X 60 1 X 41 thermal take of the big water coolers and even Intel with some of their own liquid coolers and previously and this one is important Andy for the r9 295x2 that was actually supplied by ASA tech in cooperation with AMD so this is a company that's supplying the underlying liquid cooler to the products that you were ultimately buying and we have a separate video that talks about all of this if you're curious to learn more but the manufacturers do still have input so they're not just putting a sticker on a product they do actually provide some level of input and this is part of the normal ecosystem for the industry cool IT is another one of these suppliers Coolermaster another supplier and there are plenty of other ones this table was created for a separate article and video entitled who makes your liquid coolers and shows exactly who is making the end product that you're buying in this case we see that ASA Tech largely dominates the name brands and is responsible for supplying popular CLC s like the Corsair H 100 I GTX and NZXT X 61 CLC's Coolermaster is another major supplier and outside of liquid is best known for its provision of Intel and and the stock air CPU coolers cooler masters liquid coolers include the side on Neptune and Glacier series but glacier is actually a rebadge interestingly of the Swift tech h2 twenty-something we'll get into momentarily in a lot more depth a couple of other suppliers exist in the field like a politic who work with enter Max and Silverstone and cool IT responsible for coursers age 60 H ATI H 100 I and a couple of other cooling devices right all the players established let's roll into the patents and what they mean for this case ASA Tech holds two US patents that are relevant to this story and those patent numbers are eight two four zero three six two and eight two four five seven six four there's another one we'll talk about in a bit and these were awarded on the priority dates of November 7th 2003 and May 6th 2005 respectively the entirety of ASA Tech's recent legal battles can pretty much be boiled down to these two patents within the enthusiasts ELC market there's one more again that will come shortly and these are what we'll be looking at going forward in terms of the infringing products and allegations of infringement and things of that nature at a top level these patents ultimately boil down to the specific implementation of a pump oriented atop the cold plate all housed within a single block for placement directly atop the silicon chip in its patents a stack holds the rights to the pump on cold plate invention for both CPU and GPU cooling and has been recently awarded with additional patents in China and 11 European countries which will become a topic for discussion in a moment as we move into Swift Tech Asia vital components or ABC is another major CLC OEM and on September 30th 2014 ABC challenged the validity of Asia tax patents but was dismissed on February 27 2015 by a federal judge in the US the court concluded that ABC had not presented a justiciable case and thus dismissed that case and this will become a trend for ASA Tech's patents where they successfully defend them going forward as you'll see in our timeline in a moment the patents have been used as the foundation for several legal actions over the past few years and recapping that history we start with liquid cooling manufacturer tech and the competitor cool IT back in 2003 a Stax founder and CEO first began documenting the engineering that would become patents three six to seven sixty four and seven six eight a few years later ASA tech became the first liquid cooling manufacturer to sell an all-in-one liquid cooling product which it named low-cost liquid cooling or LC LC an exclusive at the time for PC cooling this was the first of its kind on the enthusiast market or enterprise markets and shortly later in 2006 ASA Tech applied for international patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office during this time both ASA tech and competing CLC manufacturer cool IT gained popularity and rocketed to the top in the enthusiast and enterprise segment 2007 sees cool I t's invention of the fluid heat exchanger that provides a split flow for liquid cooling devices and it will later become patented in August 2012 a stack was granted the patents it requested in 2006 those three patents would catalyze the next three years of legal action as pursued by the company almost immediately following the receipt of these three patents ace attack filed a lawsuit against see LCOE M cool IT for alleged infringement on its design and the root of this infringement accusation can be drawn to the pumps orientation atop the cold plate something that ASA tech did first and for which it was awarded with these patents on January 31st 2013 ASIC launched a patent infringement case against the significantly larger Coolermaster USA or CMI USA who had ventured into CLC territory with all-in-one coolers coolermaster side on Neptune and later its Glacier series would become targets of these infringement allegations and on June 7th 2013 the Swift tech received a CND letter from ASA Tech's lawyers ASA tech alleged that the h2 20 all in one liquid cooler infringed upon patents 362 and 764 demanding that Swift tech halt sales and import of its h2 20 in the US markets immediately Swift tech shortly following this also in 2013 complied with this request and pulled its H 220 from the market in October of 2013 just months after Swift tech received the CMD from ASA tech Coolermaster USA announced its Glacier series of all-in-one liquid coolers under a new name these coolers were actually introduced as rebadge 'as of the swift tech h 220 supplied to Coolermaster by swift tech our informed speculation is that coolermaster likely granted indemnity to Swift tech for their supply of the h2 20 thus allowing the cooler to again be sold in the u.s. under a new brand and name and expanding cooler masters product line let's look back a minute at Kuwaiti so you remember there was an ASA tech filed lawsuit against Kuwaiti in 2012 at this point we're currently in 2013 that that is still going on rolling into 2014 in June Kuwaiti issued its own a lawsuit against ASA tech alleging that ASA tech had been guilty of infringing upon a split flow fluid heat exchanger which if you recall back 2007 was a device that Kauai Tia had invented in 2014 a Kuwaiti just received its patent for this device and immediately launched its lawsuit against ASA tech as what we would imagine to be a retaliation for a stacks own lawsuit against Kuwaiti so at this point in time both of those are still ongoing coolermaster is creating swift tech products with a new badge and swift tech has pulled some of its coolers from the US market under ASA taxi and the orders two months later in August 2014 ASA Tech published an eager press release indicating a quote design win with an undisclosed om customer for a graphics liquid cooling product this was clearly an D as Nvidia had no known liquid products at this time and looking back in time never officially made any of those would be out by now and that became the r9 fury X becoming a point of contention in the near future September 12 2014 a month later rumors and leaked photos of initial Radeon face plates for future GPU revealed CLC mounting brackets and all but confirmed that the fury X which we at that point in time didn't know the name of would be a liquid cooled Andy product come December of 2014 a jury found Coolermaster guilty on several counts of patent infringement against ASA tech judge tigar imposed a 14.5 percent royalty on Coolermaster USA's to date sales of affected CLC s totaling more than $400,000 in damages owed to ASA tech this marks the first major public victory for ASA tech ruling into this year 2015 Kuwaiti and ASA Tech agreed to settle that first lawsuit that ASA tech imposed on Kuwaiti and they settled in February with Kuwaiti slated to owe an amount that had been yet undisclosed at the time - ASA tech this is where we as a website began to closely follow the story writing our first major piece about the legal battles On February 8th 2015 Kuwaiti CEO and CTO Jeff Leon emailed us directly to comment on the story stating quote I read your article and thought I'd add some clarity I wanted to let you know that there will be no disruption in our supply of cooling systems to Corsair or any of our other customers as a result of settlement with ASA Tech in actual fact it has not been decided if there will be any damages due to ASA Tech at all since there's still no indication of infringement the fact is that the settlement will have no impact on our business at all aside from our management team no longer having to waste time energy and money on this ciliate lawsuit a few months later Kuwaiti completed its payment to ASA Tech of 1.9 million dollars for that settlement in April a California federal judge denied CMI USA's attempt to invalidate a stack schooling patents for quote obvious nests moving forward rapidly now September 23rd of 2015 sees another ASA tech victory over Coolermaster ASA Tech was granted an injunction against CMI USA following the CMI is a failure to pay on the royalties owed increasing the royalty fee from fourteen point five percent to twenty five point three seven five percent from January 1 and forward cm I was also barred from sale of its infringing CLC s in US markets and CMI USA is today appealing this decision and E launched its fury acts in June but was found to be using a Coolermaster CLC for its thermal dissipation we discussed the engineering and design of this cooling solution very heavily in our fury x review if you want more detail on how that's all assembled no asa tech coolers were found on fury x cards we're caught up to the last few months now at this point and on December 5th 2015 we at gamers Nexus received a direct statement from ASA Tech that the company had issued cease and desist orders to gigabyte for its GTX 980 water force card and Andy Ford's r9 in fury X card ASA Tech demanded that and ESC sales of the fury X immediately alleging that the fury ax infringes upon the same patents that Coolermaster just lost to in its own case where it now owes attack a significant sum of money and the then contacted gamers Nexus with its own statement on the legal matters at hand and we've reproduced that on the screen here the statement reads we are aware that ASA Tech has sued Coolermaster while we defer to coolermaster regarding the details of the litigation we understand that the jury in the case did not find that the Coolermaster heatsink currently used with the Radeon fury X infringed on any of ASA tax patents basically and the deferred to Coolermaster a few days later Coolermaster Taiwan reached out to us at gamers Nexus Tana and provided its own statement cm initially supplied us with a statement that was almost partially misleading whether it was intended or not claiming that a stack had dismissed its case against Coolermaster entirely the statement also suggested that the fury X card had been cleared and infringement but in reality the fury ax hadn't even been included in the suit against CMI USA because it didn't yet exist it wasn't until several pressing emails later that we reached a better understanding with one another and you can find all those emails published in their entirety in our article linked in the description below but on screen now is the official statement from coolermaster Taiwan and this is the big differentiator here that we had to get out of them for their later statements not provided freely in the first statement Coolermaster that reached out to us is a Coolermaster Taiwan not Coolermaster USA or CMI USA now these are all related companies CMI USA sells the liquid coolers and other products that coolermaster makes and CMI USA sells them in America ASA Tech originally levied its infringement lawsuit against coolermaster in Taiwan but dismissed that case when it later found that CMI USA is the party or entity independently responsible for the sale of the CLC's that Coolermaster sells in the u.s. so that's where that statement comes from that's why they say was dismissed when that is technically correct to us as as enthusiasts as journalists as readers and viewers the statement that the claim dismissed does sound a bit like a stack dismissed all claims when in fact that is not true they pursued a different segment of Coolermaster CM also noted that there are significant design differences with the fury actually pressed them for details but very understandably they are unable to provide those at this time beyond some very ambiguous basics because this is an ongoing legal matter they can't speak too much to journalists they've got to go through lawyers obviously but the one point that was brought up is that there are separable chambers for the fury acts CLC and that likely is indicating the chambers used for vrm and vram cooling specifically which the a-stack products don't do however ASX patent is on the pump on coal plate design which is used in the fury ax CLC so it's something that will have to be battled out either in court or settled or whatever as of right now there's only a CMD against AMD from selling that's r9 fury ax and ii has rather expectedly opted to continue selling in its fury ax and until a point at which a Sutekh decides it is going to further its legal action and pursue either and the or Coolermaster for this next infringement case the fury x will remain on the market so long as it's normal supply allows now we did some further research and found shipping logs documenting delivery of asa tech coolers on the fury x card to AMD which would suggest that Andy had originally planned to at least investigate using a z' attack they had used ASA tech before but instead opted for what was likely a cheaper solution from coolermaster with whom is tech had been publicly legally engaged during the period that this contract likely would have been negotiated so that brings us up to date on all the legal conflict we don't yet know how am the ASA tech and cooler master will settle these differences but it is very clear that in the least the fury X is implicated in some ways because there were products shipped to and the for use on the fury ax by ACE attack so there was some contact there and one would imagine that his tech would make very clear as they had done publicly that there is an infringement case with Coolermaster so that's hopefully answering the question that we've seen on forums of why is Andy getting dragged into this they just bought a bulk order of product how are they held responsible and that's all documented in this video in our article linked in the description below where we basically talked about and have talked about the process from the past till now of a stack defending its patent against Coolermaster kawaii and others and it's dragon AMD into the mix because and the potentially and this is probably what asia tech might think knowingly opted to use a competing product when asa tech had obviously delivered a solution to aim the for use and its fury x so that's everything as we understand it right now there's a lot more going on to these cases and we'll just have to wait and see how it develops and what happens i'm not really here to comment on whether I think the patents are valid or legitimate or useful or not that is certainly up to you guys to talk about the comments it's not what I'm here for though I'm just here to recap at all and the courts have already begun ruling on those types of things so if you want to read the cases they are online publicly and freely that is it for this video if you like this type of coverage if you like the depth that we go onto and independence that we hold then please hit the link in the description below for the article hit the patreon link in the post role video to help us directly and just comment share the video stuff like that thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you you