Question Doing an itx build in the dan case. Is a blower better than an open air cooler?

[Cole Bond]

I know this has been talked about a lot but not so much on the rtx cards. I want to put a rtx 2080. I've heard a lot that you should definitely use a blower in an itx build because it pushes the hot air out of the case instead of letting it sit in the case like an open air would do.

This all makes sense but I'm worried about noise and I can't find anything on the blower style coolers for the 2080. All the reviewers use the open air cards which makes sense because they just look better. I just don't know if the trade off of heat with say a gigabyte 2080 with 3 fans vs a gigabyte 2080 blower with cooler temps but louder is worth it.


Any ideas?

 

[Karadjgne]

Blowers are used more in mITX because of size restrictions. The axial fan designs tend to be considerably taller with the giant fan shrouds and heatsink designs. Then there's other things like the psu, the blower is quite often well beyond the back end of the psu, whereas axial fans will have serious problems with airflow near the back of the card. For the vertical mount cards, too much height infringes on the case side.

Pc's are always built in balance. With full towers, you need extra fans, extended psu leads etc. For mITX, you can only use what'll actually fit, regardless of airflow, so anything to save space and still get some performance is a bonus. The tradeoff being that some things simply won't fit, like an i9-9900k at 5GHz across all cores. Or a supremely silent build.

So personal things aside, if you want mITX, and you want a 2080, the trade off is using a blower type gpu, and a little more noise. (Potentially)

 

[tennis2]

The most important consideration is that blower fans don't exhaust their hot waste air back inside the case. They also tend to be a little noisier, yes. But they're not dumping hot air into your CPU. Also, if an axial fan GPU fills a case with hot air, it's cooling efficiency is reduced, temps go up, and fans have to spin faster.

Not saying you CAN'T use an axial cooler GPU in a SFF build, just need to maximize case airflow.