A few years ago, we published a video of the GELID Wing 12 fan being dipped into a bucket of water while running. It was pretty popular. We did that because back then GELID Solutions sent us a Wing 12 fan for review and claimed it was waterproof. Skeptical, Matt ‘Snarkasm’ Jancaitis turned the camera on and gave the fan the plunge. It worked.
GELID Solutions has been around since 2008, founded in Hong Kong by two Swiss. This means that if you own a GELID fan you can proudly say it is “Swiss Engineering”. From their website,
Design, quality and innovation are key. And, being Swiss, we leave nothing to chance. That’s why we provide a total solution – from bearings to thermal compound, from design to shipping, from the molding of the fan to the print on the box – with state-of-the-art machines and experienced staff.
I met with co-founder VC Tran, and he was happy to show me around the booth.
First off, we looked at the GX-7 cooler, a 7-heatpipe design:
GELID GX-7
The GX-7 heatpipe layout is the key feature, along with V-shaped cutouts on the heatsink fins to improve airflow on the main surface of the fans.
GELID GX-7 heatpipe layout
The other coolers they were showing have been out for a while, including the quad-heatpipe Silent Spirit:
GELID Silent Spirit cooler
There’s also an update of their slim 1U heatpipe cooler called the Slim Silence A-Plus for Mini-ITX or server applications:
GELID Slim Silence A-plus
Last, but not least, they showed a new upgraded version of their Tranquillo cooler, called the Tranquillo Rev. 2.
Next we looked at the Wing fan lineup:
There wasn’t a whole lot of newness here; the Wing 12 and Wing 14 series fans are still magnetic sleeve bearing, with the killer feature being the removable impeller for easy cleaning.
What was new is their Icy Vision-A afermarket GPU cooler for all modern Radeon GPUs, up to and including the AMD Radeon 7970
GELID Icy Vision A GPU cooler
And finally they showed off their new case, the Darkforce:
GELID Darkforce Case
In true GELID fashion, the case is optimized for cooling, with support for up to eight fans. Also a nice addition is the SATA bay on top for quick hotswap of SATA 2.5″ drives.
Last, they still have their top-rated GELID GC-Extreme thermal compound, an award-winning thermal compound that some consider the best out there (a review is forthcoming).
All in all, it was good to see GELID in form at Computex, with their small but focused lineup of PC cooling accessories. I’m glad that GELID hasn’t branched out into things like PSUs and gaming peripherals like so many others; they know their strengths and they focus on them.
One last thing; I asked VC Tran about the proper pronunciation of the company name, to quash any speculation. It’s pronounced JELL-id, like Jell-O.
Oh yeah, girls:
Articles RSS