Introduction

I have been looking forward to this day for a while now. EK Water Blocks, or simply EKWB henceforth in this article, had teased a bigger, badder version of their EK-Vardar 120 mm fans to me for a while now, and I originally thought it was the Vardar-X3M we first saw at Computex last year. That was not the case as it turns out, with the X3M still in development. What came up instead was a 38 mm thick unit of a fan that ended up with a whole new name, too. Enter the EK-Meltemi, and thanks again to EKWB for sending along review samples.


Naming schemes for products from companies have always been a small fascination of mine, if only because it reveals more about the country and culture said company is based in. The EK-Vardar fans, for instance, were named for a wind from the Macedonian region, as mentioned before, and the Meltemi follows that trend. In their own words, the fan "carries the name of a type of strong, dry northern winds of the Aegean Sea. The name Meltemi is derived from "mal tempo", meaning "bad weather" in Italian, while we can say that the EK-Meltemi is "bad news" for high temperatures". Corny? Sure, but in all the right ways in my book. Let's see if that name is validated. As always, we begin the review with a look at the specifications below.

Specifications