Friday, December 30th 2022
2-slot Air-Cooled GeForce RTX 4090 with Lateral Blower Shows Up in China
A Chinese graphics card manufacturer unveiled what is likely the only 2-slot, air-cooled GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card in existence. Most gaming-segment RTX 4090 graphics cards tend to be 3-4 slots thick, and the only 2-slot ones are liquid-cooled ones. This is due to the 450 W stock typical graphics power rating of the RTX 4090, which can go as high as 600 W for certain custom-design cards. This product is aimed at the niche that wants a bunch of RTX 4090 cards in a space-constrained workstation chassis.
The card appears to be around 30-32 cm in length, and its height is strictly what constitutes "full-height" (11.5 cm). The cooler is in fact 1-2 mm thinner than what constitutes 2-slot; and probably uses a vapor-chamber plate welded to a stack of aluminium or copper channels that dissipate heat to airflow from a lateral-blower. The heatsink may look underpowered for a GPU like the RTX 4090, but probably over-relies on the blower operating at a very high RPM at all times—same principal as server cooling, where an array of 40 mm fans at nearly max-RPM push air through thin channel-type heatsinks cooling large 250 W TDP server processors. The card lacks a backplate to make it easier for the adjacent card to breathe in air. Power is drawn from a 16-pin ATX 12VHPWR connector located at the tail-end of the card, rather than on its top. The card reportedly has its power limits locked to 450 W (probably through power-connector signal keying). The card was briefly available on Alibaba-owned peer-to-peer trading platform Goofish, where it was priced at RMB ¥15,000 (about USD $2,150).
The card appears to be around 30-32 cm in length, and its height is strictly what constitutes "full-height" (11.5 cm). The cooler is in fact 1-2 mm thinner than what constitutes 2-slot; and probably uses a vapor-chamber plate welded to a stack of aluminium or copper channels that dissipate heat to airflow from a lateral-blower. The heatsink may look underpowered for a GPU like the RTX 4090, but probably over-relies on the blower operating at a very high RPM at all times—same principal as server cooling, where an array of 40 mm fans at nearly max-RPM push air through thin channel-type heatsinks cooling large 250 W TDP server processors. The card lacks a backplate to make it easier for the adjacent card to breathe in air. Power is drawn from a 16-pin ATX 12VHPWR connector located at the tail-end of the card, rather than on its top. The card reportedly has its power limits locked to 450 W (probably through power-connector signal keying). The card was briefly available on Alibaba-owned peer-to-peer trading platform Goofish, where it was priced at RMB ¥15,000 (about USD $2,150).