This seriously beautiful RTX 3080 FE water block should be available to preorder this week

EKWB Special Edition RTX 3080 FE water block
(Image credit: EKWB)

This mouth-wateringly good looking Special Edition Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition water block is almost ready, EKWB says. In fact, you might be able to pick one up on preorder sometime this week, as the company looks to finishing up its "most advanced water block to date".

I've already gushed about this cooler's stunning construction, but, hey, now we're actually close to being able to purchase one. Buying an RTX 3080 Founders Edition to attach it to might be a little less easy, but at least we can be prepared for when those eventually come back into stock worldwide.

EKWB calls its new Special Edition water block its most advanced yet, and it's certainly easy to see from the surface at least a little of what it's talking about. With threaded channels out of the far side of the block, as opposed to on the parallel edge to the PCB, it's already a little unconventional. 

We're expecting further fine tuning on the interior, too, as this block looks incredibly well machined just from the pictures above.

EKWB also announced blocks for AMD Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs this week, with a view to pairing them up with matching AMD Ryzen CPU blocks. The initial designs are a little less flashy than the Nvidia Special Edition before you today, pretty much standard fare, in fact. But let's hope if the RX 6000-series cards are the smash-hit AMD says they are then we'll be seeing more extra effort designs for the often ignored red team.

Keep an eye out for the Special Edition RTX 3080 block later this week. Similarly, EKWB is offering pre-installed blocks on top of Asus RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 cards to save you the hassle of installing your own.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

Latest in Graphics Cards
A side by side comparison of two Asus Q-Release systems, with the original design on the top and the bottom showing the apparently new design.
Asus appears to have quietly changed the design of its Q-Release PCIe slot after claims of potential GPU pin damage
A Colorful RTX 5080 and its box
Three lucky folks in India can win the dubious honour of buying an RTX 5080 GPU at Nvidia MSRP
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Group allegedly trying to smuggle Nvidia Blackwell chips stare down bail set at over $1 million
Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds
AI will be crammed in more of the graphics pipeline as Nvidia and Microsoft are bringing AI shading to a DirectX preview next month
Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards alongside an RTX 4090
Nvidia says it's sold twice as many RTX 50-series cards as RTX 40-series in the first 5 weeks. I'd bloody well hope so given there was essentially just the RTX 4090 for competition
AMD Radeon RX 9070/9070 XT graphics cards with artistic renders of reference design cards circled
Looks like a reference design AMD RX 9070 XT card has shown up in China, but let's not get carried away with thoughts of MBA cards just yet
Latest in News
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam
Possibility Space concept art.
Possibility Space owners sue NetEase for $900 million over allegations it spread 'false and defamatory rumors' of fraud at the studio that ultimately forced it to close