Autumn is here, leaves are falling and it is time to unpack your leaf blowers. But being a maker of computer hardware, Asus can produce different kinds of leaf blowers: graphics cards with blower type coolers. On Monday, the company introduced its Turbo GeForce RTX 3070 Ti board, one of the industry’s first RTX 3070 Ti products with a turbine-based cooler.
Designed to compete with the best graphics cards, the Asus Turbo GeForce RTX 3070 Ti carries Nvidia’s GA104-400 graphics processor with 6144 CUDA cores clocked at up to 1800 MHz in OC boost mode as well as 8GB of 19 GT/s GDDR6X memory. The board has two eight-pin auxiliary power connectors as well as four display outputs (three DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1), just like many competing RTX 3070 Ti cards.
From performance point of view, the Asus Turbo GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is similar to other cards based on the same GPU and equipped with 8GB of GDDR6X memory. The main selling point of the product is its blower cooling systems that allows you to use the board in small form-factor systems or install several Turbo GeForce RTX 3070 Ti cards into one PC.
Blower type coolers have a controversial reputation. They were first introduced to the PC world with Nvidia’s GeForce FX 5800 Ultra graphics card that did not impress with performance, but surprised gamers with how loud its turbine was. Over time, developers of GPUs learned how to properly implement blower coolers to ensure that they were not as loud as the FX 5800 Ultra. At the same time, they started to build cooling systems with two or three fans that provided a similar level of performance without producing excessive noise levels, so blower type coolers became rare beasts in the early 2010s.
But if you need to cool down a graphics cards that dissipates around 300W in a small PC, a blower type cooler is just what the doctor ordered as it exhausts hot air outside of the case and therefore can do the job even when internal airflows are far from perfect.
Furthermore, when multiple graphics cards are installed into one system, blowers are the only type of cooling systems that can provide sufficient cooling performance in tightly-packed environments with restricted airflow. To that end, Nvidia itself uses blowers with its datacenter and workstation-oriented products.
This is reason why Nvidia does not really like when its partners install blowers on their consumer-oriented boards. It is close to impossible to find a GeForce RTX 3090 or a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with a blower cooler, though Asus offers its Turbo GeForce RTX 3080 cards with a blower cooling system.
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