News Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPUs with blower-style coolers appear in China — design optimizes Nvidia's fastest gaming GPUs for use in AI workloads

[Admin]

Leaked photos of GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs with blower-style design raise questions about the feasibility of unauthorized distribution and cooling.

Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPUs with blower-style coolers appear in China — design optimizes Nvidia's fastest gaming GPUs for use in AI workloads : Read more

 

[acadia11]

Never understood why more AIBs don’t offer blower style cooling solutions? Everything is open air ….

 

[ejolson]

Not offering blower coolers is for market segmentation. In China there is no need to protect profit margins on the data center parts since export restrictions mean those parts can't be sold in China anyway.

It would help independent developers, home labs and AI enthusiasts to sell the 5090 with 32GB and a blower cooler everywhere.

 

[jlake3]

Never understood why more AIBs don’t offer blower style cooling solutions? Everything is open air ….

There’s a couple theories.

• Blower cards have largely been looked down upon by gamers for being hot and loud and consequently sold poorly, so AIBs stopped making them
• Rising TDPs meant that blower designs were going to get more complicated and more expensive, and it became cheaper to make base models open-air
• Nvidia is worried about brand image, and won’t authorise AIBs to sell blower coolers because they’re worried that they might throttle or sound like a jet engine, and that would reflect poorly on the Nvidia brand overall.
• Nvidia ordered a stop to blower-style gaming cards expressly to prevent their reuse in servers and workstations, so that customers with size restrictions and airflow patterns that require the use of blower cards are left no option but to step up to the Quadro lineup.

Edit:
Speculating on the above, I think the truth might be a bit of all of them? If I remember correctly, the GTX 900-series it wasn’t too hard to find a blower version of a 970 or 980 through the whole generation, the GTX 10-series there were blower versions of 1070s and 1080s but they mostly disappeared as the generation went on, RTX 20-series Asus still had the “Turbo” model (and I think one other brand with a blower listed on Newegg?), but I only remember seeing that in 2060 and 2070 versions, along with OEM blower versions of the 60/70-class… then for 30-series all the holdouts threw in the towel at once. Some AIB in Asia announced a 3090 blower, if I recall, and then it vanished and they never spoke of it again.

 

[johnb44672]

There’s a couple theories.

• Blower cards have largely been looked down upon by gamers for being hot and loud and consequently sold poorly, so AIBs stopped making them
• Rising TDPs meant that blower designs were going to get more complicated and more expensive, and it became cheaper to make base models open-air
• Nvidia is worried about brand image, and won’t authorise AIBs to sell blower coolers because they’re worried that they might throttle or sound like a jet engine, and that would reflect poorly on the Nvidia brand overall.
• Nvidia ordered a stop to blower-style gaming cards expressly to prevent their reuse in servers and workstations, so that customers with size restrictions and airflow patterns that require the use of blower cards are left no option but to step up to the Quadro lineup.

Edit:
Speculating on the above, I think the truth might be a bit of all of them? If I remember correctly, the GTX 900-series it wasn’t too hard to find a blower version of a 970 or 980 through the whole generation, the GTX 10-series there were blower versions of 1070s and 1080s but they mostly disappeared as the generation went on, RTX 20-series Asus still had the “Turbo” model (and I think one other brand with a blower listed on Newegg?), but I only remember seeing that in 2060 and 2070 versions, along with OEM blower versions of the 60/70-class… then for 30-series all the holdouts threw in the towel at once. Some AIB in Asia announced a 3090 blower, if I recall, and then it vanished and they never spoke of it again.

I think relatively “near” the beginning of the 30-series is when they really cracked down on blower cards. Asus, Gigabyte and some others all “made” the cards, but they weren’t available for very long and are still hard to get a hold of. I have both a 3080 and a 3090 blower style card in my multi-gpu rig, along with a 2070S and 1080. The 3090 was bought more recently, used of course, and imported.

I thoroughly believe the main reason they aren’t “allowed” is that Nvidia didn’t want people using GeForce in higher-end, multi-gpu applications. I was in a job where I helped make decisions on purchases a number of years back and I had suggested GPU based rendering for some visual effects workstations. I was specifically inquiring about GeForce cards instead of Quattros. That was at an expo and some of the venders that wanted to sell those pricey systems didn’t like that I was inquiring about GeForce-level cards (1080s at the time).

I love blower cards and are the main ones I am interested in…so am sad to see them gone!

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Pfft. der8auer just showed off the RTX Pro 6000. The new benchmark.

He comically and very casually stated the power connectors new name, '12V-HighFailure'

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Never understood why more AIBs don’t offer blower style cooling solutions? Everything is open air ….

^^^ This

What gets me is that the problem is exacerbated with glass side panels as the hot air exhaust is directed at the glass panel. My only solution is to add more fans to my prebuilt or remove the side panel while gaming. I have been trying to find a current generation card with a rear exhaust and they appear to NO longer exist.

 

[acadia11]

^^^ This

What gets me is that the problem is exacerbated with glass side panels as the hot air exhaust is directed at the glass panel. My only solution is to add more fans to my prebuilt or remove the side panel while gaming. I have been trying to find a current generation card with a rear exhaust and they appear to NO longer exist.

Exactly , it doesn’t seem like a difficult engineering problem to solve, if you can make a jet fighter stealthy am pretty sure one can make a silent blower.

 

[HardwiredWireless]

These guys have to do something with the cards that they steal and replace with backpacks and other weighty objects.

 

[abufrejoval]

I just noticed: even the RTX 5090 is finally down to MSRP in Germany (~ €2400 including taxes) and no issues around availability.

The Pro 6000 is €10.000, though, hard to imagine those HBM vendors get much from that graft.

 

[BFG-9000]

Blowers aren't necessarily loud. They are only loud in GPUs because there is only room for one fan, and if you only had one axial fan of the same diameter on a 575w RTX 5090, well it would be loud too. 3080 was first to exceed 300w stock (not even the single Titans did that) which nVidia probably considered as getting excessive for one fan.

The main feature of a blower fan is its ability to work against high static pressure which isn't really used on a GPU because the very high fin density it would work best using would plug up with dust quickly. But it's way easier to package a shroud for them that exhausts all the hot air outside the case.