Cooling "Engine"? FlowDrive? – are these just fancy marketing words or do they actually mean something? Well, it's both, as it turns out.
The iCUE LINK Titan coolers are our first coolers where we have built up the pump from the ground up. We did this as the biggest issue with AIO coolers for many enthusiasts has been that while you can get amazing performance from a 360mm or even 420mm AIO, you would still be left with a slight humming noise from the little engine that could. So even if your fans could run at super slow speeds, you would sometimes be able to hear the pump over them. In custom cooling such as our Hydro X Series lineup, this is not an issue as we use enormous (compared to AIO pumps) pump/reservoir units which can be turned down in speed to where they are practically inaudible. In AIOs on the other hand, you have a limited amount of space to work with (price is also a factor, as some pumps for custom cooling can costs more than an entire AIO cooler).
The cooling engine refers to our cold plate design. Modern CPUs from Intel and AMD are unfortunately not the same shape, and have a slight curve to them. This means that the CPUs are not actually flat, despite looking like it.
Exaggerated example of how our coldplate is ever so slightly curved to match the curve of a CPU
The issue is that since AMD and Intel CPU´s do not have the same “shape”, so you can either make separate cold plates that are super optimized for each (thus increasing the costs of the coolers as you would have to develop, and have inventory of double the coolers), or you can optimize the cold plate so it have great (not perfect) contact with both types, which is the route we (and most other AIOs on the market) have taken as making separate coolers will likely only gain you a few degrees, if even that much. This also makes it easier to upgrade to a new system should you decide to swap between AMD and Intel when you upgrade, but want to keep your cooler.
The flow drive is where it gets interesting. This is because it is our first pump designed fully in-house, we can now achieve much lower noise levels on the pump, and also get rid of the signature “hum” that most AIOs have. The pump in the TITAN coolers utilize a 3 phase motor pump where previous generations use a 1 phase motor pump. With the new design we get better flow rates, at lower noise levels than previous generations. All in all this enables the cooler to run much quieter, being borderline close to even high-end custom cooling setups.
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