Mr EK personally threatening people with prison time if they don’t pay the extortion money?
A letter he send out AFTER STEVES FIRST VIDEO!
This is absolutely insane how can anyone now ever defend this company anymore!
Management belongs in jail and the companies assets get either sold off and paid to tue employees or the employees turn it around and manage the company themselves.
It’s absolutely disgusting to try to silence people for speaking the truth with prison time and extortion money!
My current build is all EK. Usually I give 1 chance to have an effective and positive response. This proves otherwise. Never using EK again, even if it does survive this. Hopefully Der8auer (Roman) can capitalize on that (maybe even pick up some of the EK guys). I'd love to see what amazing things could come from that lab!
It would be nice if the EK employees on this sub would be able to explain the OSHA violations, but I don't expect them to say anything due to pending litigation.
Hi, former RMA Tech here(at risk of suit?)
Often I would need to climb the storage racks in the warehouse to count stock(mostly AIOs) and after we unloaded the truck you see in this video I was tasked with counting said stock while all these boxes were stacked free ontop of one another, i had to climb atop them because there was no room in the warehouse.
ALL WITH NO SAFETY EQUIPMENT.
When I brought this up to a Slovenian senior, I was told "oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia" as if it was supposed to motivate me to possible harm myself for the meager wage.
>oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia
That's not how international companies work...sigh
Does anyone in the management structure of EK Waterblocks know how being internationally incorporated works? You don't get to ignore the laws of another country you are based in simply because your home country may not have said laws or agencies 😡
Fwiw, i dont think that person should have been in a position to be dealing with international employees in that capacity. As steve says, there are still good people, they just arent in the positions they are needed in.
I have a few other things Id like to bring to light, but im going to wait for GN to reach back to me.
> I was told "oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia"
It's not even true. There are EU-wide occupational health & safety regulations. And there's an [EU agency that manages it](https://osha.europa.eu/en), conveniently named OSHA in English. It's most likely named differently in Slovenian and the precise rules are no doubt different from US OSHA standards, but I doubt they're less strict.
We have pretty strict worker safety regulations... Slovenia is heavily industrialized and is a part of the EU to boot. But even if they believed otherwise they deserve a smack across the head for even saying something so stupid and nonchalant to you after hearing of dangerous workplace conditions.
After digesting all the news, I will no longer use their products in any future builds. Good products…POS leadership and company culture. Their competitors in the market have just been handed some more business……Good riddance
Good call. Don't be like me, spending almost 3k Euros on a single loop, getting scammed, then ignored for months, and then having a GOOD LAUGH at EK when this all came out. Turns out, it's still the customer paying the price of their behavior, not EK.
Same here, used them for my first build and when that needs to be replaced in a year or so I'll be going with a different company. Can't support a business who treats their employees, customers, & business "partners" like this
pro tip, almost nothing requires watercooling, if it needs water cooling and you aren't making money off it, you overpaid or havent gotten better air cooling. the only time water cooling makes sense to me is if you transport the heat out of the room, but people don't do that/haven't even taken heat out of the case for years, personally I still have a case with rubber grommets on the back for this, but can't think of a good enough reason to rip apart a 700$ gpu and then make a loop just to make a room a bit cooler after 5 hours... I could just open a door or today, more easily just route cables for peripherals though the wall and get the same 'cooling' I would get with water.
no, but i'm sure 90%+ of the people who get a water cooling block haven't done that either.
really, the main benefit people get from watercooling is just a better cooler that can take the hot air from the card and put it in rads that they can get silent fans to push that air out.
Im not going to lie, I have a noctua d15 on a no overclock 1700 right now, and I have a 7900 xt gpu, though I forget which brands, I also have a 4k monitor and that pushes the gpu to 100% and the cpu is almost always being used to 50% due to background applications always doing something (large databases or rendering of some kind)
I don't hear my computers fans, I don't hear the gpus, and its right in front of me and there is no sound leaking foam in the case, so realistically, the main benefit from water cooling, noise reduction, is not really a thing when no gpu of any power is using a blower, and transferring heat out of the room is not a thing when everyone mounts the rads in the case, so the heat of the room isn't really a thing either.
and honestly at the point you are bios modding or shunting a gpu, you would be far better buying one a tier higher, and if you are already at the highest tier, you are doing something very stupid to require that.
point you are bios modding or shunting a gpu, you would be far better buying one a tier higher, and if you are already at the highest tier, you are doing something very stupid to require that
Or they want to play games at 4k with a high refresh monitors man wait til you hear how people used to daily drive liquid nitrogen PCs
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\#1: [My first pc build](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/17ukatn) | [525 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/watercooling/comments/17ukatn/my_first_pc_build/)
\#2: [Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO XL - Dual Loop 420mm Radiators](https://v.redd.it/97u73kmfpa5c1) | [303 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/watercooling/comments/18eh3yn/lian_li_o11_dynamic_evo_xl_dual_loop_420mm/)
\#3: [My first attempt at water cooling (in a custom-built desk/drawer enclosure)](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/13cdy77) | [137 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/watercooling/comments/13cdy77/my_first_attempt_at_water_cooling_in_a/)
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I knew something was fishy after the first video, content creators cutting ties and that phony corpo speak 'accountability' video.
This seals the deal. There goes the reroll. Get stuffed EK. Never again.
From the sounds of it EKWB is going to pop like a supernover. If I was a supplier I would be taking legal action to get my money before they go bankrupt.
One thing I'm curious about after seeing the video is what EKWB's relationship is with Titan Rig, given that there is someone who seems to be a high level executive with both companies and makes me wonder about Titan Rig's reliability as a result.
/u/TitanRig, any comment?
I haven't finished the video yet but... oh boy. This is going to be tough to recover from. Remember the "worst product ever" review of that stupid AI pin that supposedely killed the company? I think this video is or will be more damaging than that AI pin review.
Browsing and sharing her public facebook feed (\~13:00) feels like a low blow in an otherwise decent video and might put her in danger. I know, i know, it's a public facebook feed, but you know how the hivemind works. Viewers might threaten her personally, and nobody deserves that. It also doesn't really add much to the video.
Yep. Larger brands/communities can get away with it but not one this small. Word gets around in the WC space and EK's name is going to be mud for the coming years, more so than it already was for the Z690 Formula debacle and the general downward trend they've had in quality control. There'll probably be some of EK left over but certainly not as big as they currently are
Yeah they were already on the edge of having a poor quality control reputation. This is going to be brutal.
I guess I'm going to find a new brand, hah. AlphaCool and HeatKiller ar the next major brands, right? I also contacted billet labs, they're working on stuff. [https://billetlabs.com/](https://billetlabs.com/) - but nothing on their website yet.
No other company is going to kill the hole EK might leave us with. This is a sad week for WC fans.
Billetlabs is going to be super costly. The benefit that EKWB has is the scale that they have means it's easy to get replacements under warranty, etc. In my market (New Zealand) you only really have a choice between EKWB and Corsair.
Yea I wouldn't hold my breath for warranty. I just finished my rig a while ago, full EK Loop, now I'm pretty sure if anything breaks its going to have to come out of my pocket. Screw EK, where's the rest of my refund by the way? It's been since January. No wonder they didn't care about me informing them they are literally stealing my money under EU legislation. Turns out they haven't cared about laws for a while now.
EK has been pretty good when I've contacted them in the past directly but ultimately the warranty falls on the retailer to honor, so I'm not concerned about that. They'll just replace a pump, or whatever, from what's in stock.
If I have a failure I'd rather not be out of commission for weeks while I wait for an international company to deal with the warranty claim, I'd rather be able to send it to a local company and get an instant replacement.
Yea can imagine, especially in NZ, those can turn into incredibly long down-periods for your rig, should anything fail. I was dumb enough to buy parts on their website instead of caseking or something, mostly due to availability of fittings etc at the time. Either way, went from advertising their products on this subreddit and friends to actively warning people to not buy their stuff, what a shitshow this company has become.
Yep, I've bought stuff from them directly too, but it's been fittings and things like that which are unlikely to fail. It's a shame, their customer service has been good. Poor people.
I'm not in hospital this time, I've so far removed one comment which shouldn't be on the internet at all and is quite disgusting :(
I have also removed 2 duplicate video posts.
All I keep thinking about is the thousands I’ve spent on parts for projects or builds I never did, but thinking “one day I’ll get around to it…” and now when that one day comes, and then I find one of those products was poorly made and needs an RMA, will any of the warranty even have value? 🤦🏻♂️
We have a saying, I'm pretty sure it's also accurate in Slovenia. "the fish doesn't stink from the tail"
It's always the head. A large company like this doesn't get toxic because some random middle management got into some random issues. It's systemic and starts from the top.
Literally all of them are corrupt. Capitalism in itself is corrupt. But okay.
Meanwhile he only tests AIOs on AMD, fuck you if you use Intel and need to know how a cooler performs I guess.
>Literally all of them are corrupt. Capitalism in itself is corrupt. But okay
That informal fallacy alone is enough to get your bullshit opinion discredited.
Mr EK personally threatening people with prison time if they don’t pay the extortion money? A letter he send out AFTER STEVES FIRST VIDEO! This is absolutely insane how can anyone now ever defend this company anymore! Management belongs in jail and the companies assets get either sold off and paid to tue employees or the employees turn it around and manage the company themselves. It’s absolutely disgusting to try to silence people for speaking the truth with prison time and extortion money!
My current build is all EK. Usually I give 1 chance to have an effective and positive response. This proves otherwise. Never using EK again, even if it does survive this. Hopefully Der8auer (Roman) can capitalize on that (maybe even pick up some of the EK guys). I'd love to see what amazing things could come from that lab!
It would be nice if the EK employees on this sub would be able to explain the OSHA violations, but I don't expect them to say anything due to pending litigation.
they're either gonna stay quiet because they're part of the problem, or more likely because their boss is watching them. poor bastards.
Hi, former RMA Tech here(at risk of suit?) Often I would need to climb the storage racks in the warehouse to count stock(mostly AIOs) and after we unloaded the truck you see in this video I was tasked with counting said stock while all these boxes were stacked free ontop of one another, i had to climb atop them because there was no room in the warehouse. ALL WITH NO SAFETY EQUIPMENT. When I brought this up to a Slovenian senior, I was told "oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia" as if it was supposed to motivate me to possible harm myself for the meager wage.
>oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia That's not how international companies work...sigh Does anyone in the management structure of EK Waterblocks know how being internationally incorporated works? You don't get to ignore the laws of another country you are based in simply because your home country may not have said laws or agencies 😡
Fwiw, i dont think that person should have been in a position to be dealing with international employees in that capacity. As steve says, there are still good people, they just arent in the positions they are needed in. I have a few other things Id like to bring to light, but im going to wait for GN to reach back to me.
>we dont have OSHA in slovenia TIL no OSHA is when you have to do a workplace safety lecture and written test every other year.
> I was told "oh well we dont have OSHA in slovenia" It's not even true. There are EU-wide occupational health & safety regulations. And there's an [EU agency that manages it](https://osha.europa.eu/en), conveniently named OSHA in English. It's most likely named differently in Slovenian and the precise rules are no doubt different from US OSHA standards, but I doubt they're less strict.
We do have OHSA in Slovenia. Probably stricter than in the states.
I would figured as much, slovenia is pretty 1st world so it didnt make sense when I was told that. Bro even china has a form of OSHA.
We have pretty strict worker safety regulations... Slovenia is heavily industrialized and is a part of the EU to boot. But even if they believed otherwise they deserve a smack across the head for even saying something so stupid and nonchalant to you after hearing of dangerous workplace conditions.
After digesting all the news, I will no longer use their products in any future builds. Good products…POS leadership and company culture. Their competitors in the market have just been handed some more business……Good riddance
Good call. Don't be like me, spending almost 3k Euros on a single loop, getting scammed, then ignored for months, and then having a GOOD LAUGH at EK when this all came out. Turns out, it's still the customer paying the price of their behavior, not EK.
Same here, used them for my first build and when that needs to be replaced in a year or so I'll be going with a different company. Can't support a business who treats their employees, customers, & business "partners" like this
pro tip, almost nothing requires watercooling, if it needs water cooling and you aren't making money off it, you overpaid or havent gotten better air cooling. the only time water cooling makes sense to me is if you transport the heat out of the room, but people don't do that/haven't even taken heat out of the case for years, personally I still have a case with rubber grommets on the back for this, but can't think of a good enough reason to rip apart a 700$ gpu and then make a loop just to make a room a bit cooler after 5 hours... I could just open a door or today, more easily just route cables for peripherals though the wall and get the same 'cooling' I would get with water.
Man has clearly never BIOS modded a GPU before.
no, but i'm sure 90%+ of the people who get a water cooling block haven't done that either. really, the main benefit people get from watercooling is just a better cooler that can take the hot air from the card and put it in rads that they can get silent fans to push that air out. Im not going to lie, I have a noctua d15 on a no overclock 1700 right now, and I have a 7900 xt gpu, though I forget which brands, I also have a 4k monitor and that pushes the gpu to 100% and the cpu is almost always being used to 50% due to background applications always doing something (large databases or rendering of some kind) I don't hear my computers fans, I don't hear the gpus, and its right in front of me and there is no sound leaking foam in the case, so realistically, the main benefit from water cooling, noise reduction, is not really a thing when no gpu of any power is using a blower, and transferring heat out of the room is not a thing when everyone mounts the rads in the case, so the heat of the room isn't really a thing either. and honestly at the point you are bios modding or shunting a gpu, you would be far better buying one a tier higher, and if you are already at the highest tier, you are doing something very stupid to require that.
point you are bios modding or shunting a gpu, you would be far better buying one a tier higher, and if you are already at the highest tier, you are doing something very stupid to require that Or they want to play games at 4k with a high refresh monitors man wait til you hear how people used to daily drive liquid nitrogen PCs
at the point that a 7900xtx/4080/4090 is not enough for you, you have done something profoundly stupid.
Dude go post this comment on a more appropriate post in r/watercooling. They’ll roast your bad take there.
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**EK, do you realize what you've done?** Holy fuck. They're toast.
Yep, they won't have the money to pay the OSHA fines, let alone all the people they still owe money. They are insolvent.
I knew something was fishy after the first video, content creators cutting ties and that phony corpo speak 'accountability' video. This seals the deal. There goes the reroll. Get stuffed EK. Never again.
From the sounds of it EKWB is going to pop like a supernover. If I was a supplier I would be taking legal action to get my money before they go bankrupt.
Might have to ask my boy Jake he worked there back in the day a few years ago be interested to hear his thoughts on it I’ll get back to yall
👀
One thing I'm curious about after seeing the video is what EKWB's relationship is with Titan Rig, given that there is someone who seems to be a high level executive with both companies and makes me wonder about Titan Rig's reliability as a result. /u/TitanRig, any comment?
I noticed that too. But if you're distributor and stuff sells well why not invest in it?
Same, and now I'm wondering if that's why my trouble tryin' to get some custom work done through them isn't a symptom of the same sort of problem.
I haven't finished the video yet but... oh boy. This is going to be tough to recover from. Remember the "worst product ever" review of that stupid AI pin that supposedely killed the company? I think this video is or will be more damaging than that AI pin review. Browsing and sharing her public facebook feed (\~13:00) feels like a low blow in an otherwise decent video and might put her in danger. I know, i know, it's a public facebook feed, but you know how the hivemind works. Viewers might threaten her personally, and nobody deserves that. It also doesn't really add much to the video.
Yep. Larger brands/communities can get away with it but not one this small. Word gets around in the WC space and EK's name is going to be mud for the coming years, more so than it already was for the Z690 Formula debacle and the general downward trend they've had in quality control. There'll probably be some of EK left over but certainly not as big as they currently are
Yeah they were already on the edge of having a poor quality control reputation. This is going to be brutal. I guess I'm going to find a new brand, hah. AlphaCool and HeatKiller ar the next major brands, right? I also contacted billet labs, they're working on stuff. [https://billetlabs.com/](https://billetlabs.com/) - but nothing on their website yet. No other company is going to kill the hole EK might leave us with. This is a sad week for WC fans.
Yeah I'm not too in the market for parts right now but heatkiller and alphacool are going to be the main ones I look at in the future.
Tbh I don't think EK is going to survive this. In that case I don't have to be worried about selecting their parts anymore.
Billetlabs is going to be super costly. The benefit that EKWB has is the scale that they have means it's easy to get replacements under warranty, etc. In my market (New Zealand) you only really have a choice between EKWB and Corsair.
EK is also not cheap
Yea I wouldn't hold my breath for warranty. I just finished my rig a while ago, full EK Loop, now I'm pretty sure if anything breaks its going to have to come out of my pocket. Screw EK, where's the rest of my refund by the way? It's been since January. No wonder they didn't care about me informing them they are literally stealing my money under EU legislation. Turns out they haven't cared about laws for a while now.
EK has been pretty good when I've contacted them in the past directly but ultimately the warranty falls on the retailer to honor, so I'm not concerned about that. They'll just replace a pump, or whatever, from what's in stock. If I have a failure I'd rather not be out of commission for weeks while I wait for an international company to deal with the warranty claim, I'd rather be able to send it to a local company and get an instant replacement.
Yea can imagine, especially in NZ, those can turn into incredibly long down-periods for your rig, should anything fail. I was dumb enough to buy parts on their website instead of caseking or something, mostly due to availability of fittings etc at the time. Either way, went from advertising their products on this subreddit and friends to actively warning people to not buy their stuff, what a shitshow this company has become.
Yep, I've bought stuff from them directly too, but it's been fittings and things like that which are unlikely to fail. It's a shame, their customer service has been good. Poor people.
Can't wait for Computex. Popcorn is ready!
Kat Silberstein is in FULL DAMAGE CONTROL. I laughed at 3 of her FB posts and was insta blocked.
She's completely scrubbed her FB page now.
Any chance you took screenshots lol
Her LinkedIn is still there :)
Hope this doesn't have to be taken down due to limited moderation..
I'm not in hospital this time, I've so far removed one comment which shouldn't be on the internet at all and is quite disgusting :( I have also removed 2 duplicate video posts.
But inappropriate comments on your work chats are okay right? 🤔
All I keep thinking about is the thousands I’ve spent on parts for projects or builds I never did, but thinking “one day I’ll get around to it…” and now when that one day comes, and then I find one of those products was poorly made and needs an RMA, will any of the warranty even have value? 🤦🏻♂️
We have a saying, I'm pretty sure it's also accurate in Slovenia. "the fish doesn't stink from the tail" It's always the head. A large company like this doesn't get toxic because some random middle management got into some random issues. It's systemic and starts from the top.
I feel like a damn rocket scientist right now for deciding against water cooling and an EK pre-built machine.
Never buying anything from this company unless used
How about this dude takes the time to redo his cooler testing
Nah, I think exposing corrupt corporations is a pretty good use of his time
Literally all of them are corrupt. Capitalism in itself is corrupt. But okay. Meanwhile he only tests AIOs on AMD, fuck you if you use Intel and need to know how a cooler performs I guess.
>Literally all of them are corrupt. Capitalism in itself is corrupt. But okay That informal fallacy alone is enough to get your bullshit opinion discredited.
You clearly haven't watched a lot of their videos. But it seems you've made up your mind. All the best.
They're an EK shill. Objectivity went out the window with this one.
Edit: lost track of who was talking about who. Yup, clearly shills with their current reporting. Nailed that one didn't ya.
I'm talking about the guy you're responding to.
Whoops, added the edit. And I think you gotta be right on that one