I have no problem with patents, nobody would dare invest in lengthy, costly research without them. But I do have a problem with too broad and simple patents (the US patent office especially seems to be a fan of them). I'm no expert, so I can't judge this particular case fairly, but it seems pretty funny that Asetek waited until a whole bunch of manufacturers had their production lines running and store shelves full of products until it suddenly decided to taken them all down and collect massive royalties afterwards. I have used Antec closed loop coolers in two of my last builds. They most certainly fell under this Asetek patent, which is why they disappeared from shops and were replaced with ugly models avoiding the patent. Funnily enough I had never even heard of Asetek before all of the patent cases. The company certainly didn't do good work selling itself to home system builders, but did very good job exploiting other manufacturers who actually managed to sell their products. Maybe Asetek is a company with good research, good lawyers, but no businessmen?

This doesn't affect the Fury X in any way.

So it's cooler? Which can be made by a hobo in any garage? Not their biggest GPU ever, 600mm2 no redundancy, coupled with next year RAM technology? uhmm just no...

No that's not what I'm implying. Look at it this way the AIO cooler is more expensive and AMD would possibly have to pay into this settlement. They unofficially stop production on the FuryX and focus on Nano and Fury. Crap yields go to Fury good yields go to Nano. This is not backed by any proof just a thought. Keep in mind though we have already seen some fully functional Fiji chips made into Fiji Pro's. As I said, It may not be a yield issue."

There are plenty of Nano and Fury's available though but no X. I doubt it's yields at this point, but it could be.

What Asetek did, was take 2 products developed by other companies and merge them together. Not exactly revolutionary. I'd have no issue with them protecting their "patents" if they actually licensed their patents to other companies. Since they don't, they're a hindrance to progress.

I just filed for a patent too. I have a smart solution to the age-old problem of leaving your house. Billions of people world-wide live in houses. However, there is no easy method of leaving their house. I came up with the ingenious idea of a "door". It's basically a hole in a wall, and you build an openable obstacle into that wall. You can open it, thus having an exit from or entry into the house, and then close it again. I'm 100% sure the U.S. patent office will grant that patent. I will get royalties paid for every door that exists.

You're either young then or haven't been into overclocking/water cooling very long.

The latter. I didn't even consider water cooling before I happened to spot the closed loop coolers. I don't know if Asetek sold those under their own name, but the ones I saw first were Antec and Corsair. I bet there are a lot of others like me, who would believe the difficulty of building a real, custom water cooling from basic components to be high, but a closed loop is no more challenging than any air cooler. That's why I say Asetek didn't market them properly, assuming they indeed are the original innovator.

The TLDR: Asetek sued Coolermaster America and won. Coolermaster America claimed to have completely stopped selling the infringing products and was ordered to pay a 14.5% royalty on all products sold by Coolermaster America in the US. This came out out to ~$400,000. Coolermaster was still selling products in the US despite their claims and wasn't including them in the court totals. Asetek took Coolermaster back to court for enhanced damages (25.375% of all products sold in the US since January 1st 2015). Asetek won this. Asetek also won an injunction banning the listed products from sale in the US. The cooler on the Fury X is very similar to the Seidon 120V (which is part of the successful injunction). This means it could fall under the injunction and might also be banned. Asetek has not asked for any royalties from AMD and all of this is still speculation.

Patent trolling at it's finest.

Entities which license their patented technologies on reasonable terms is not to be considered as "patent trolls"

We understand word "Reasonable" in different way. USA is known as "Heaven of Patent and Copyright Trolling". No offense.

Idk, I don't see the problem. I definitely agree that there is a fair share of US patent trolls but that term is usually in reference to companies who don't provide any tangible product related to the patent. Asetek has GPU/CPU off the shelf components that they sell and they are pretty heavily involved in the OEM server watercooling market. They also license their patents to other companies. You could definitely argue that maybe they shouldn't have have been able to get some of these patents, but I don't see them using them unreasonably.

Yeah you are right, it's my definition of "Patent trolling" which is screwed up. I also use it for patenting something crazy, like shape, working conditions, setup of tools using to create some content etc etc.

you are not so far from what reality is... the spoon patent have been grant near us despite it is one of the oldest tool of humanity.

how do you call ppl talking about things they don't know anything about

or ppl screaming patent troll! every time someone gets sued for patent infringement.

Stupid. People who opened their eyes? who believes that patent system is misused most of the time? Especially if event takes place in USA.