Spotted at Computex: The Ultimate GPU Air Cooling Solution
by Ian Cutress on June 5, 2019 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- PowerColor
- Trade Shows
- FPGA
- Xilinx
- PCIe
- Computex 2019
Graphics cards and PCIe cards come with a limited set of cooling options. Some of the low TDP models are passive, before going up to active cooling on higher TDP models. Air cooling comes with one, two, or three fans, and even moves to triple-slot coolers. Beyond this is liquid cooling, either with a dedicated pump and reservoir per card, or a water block in a combined water cooling system. What if you want to deafen your neighbors with noise? Powercolor has a solution for you.
On display was a Xilinx high-end FPGA connected to an airflow chamber mechanism that is powered by two large 250+ CFM (cubic feet per minute) high static pressure fans that pushes the air through to a single PCIe slot gap with a small air cooler. Each fan directs the air to either side of the card. This solution minimizes the amount of heatsink on the PCIe card and instead replaces it with this air chamber and some loud deafening fans.
Truth be told, this is for a server installation. However it seems alarmingly bulky, especially as a goal of the single slot design might be for density, and that air chamber seems overly large. That card in this case is a 2x100 GbE design for a SmartNIC or machine learning, but could easily be a new GPU jacked up to a few hundred watts.
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24 Comments
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alpha754293 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
This "article" has the dumbest title I've yet to see out of Anandtech.Shame on you, Dr. Cutress.
You should know better.
And how is this ANYYYY different than ANYYY of the passively cooled, rackmounted, multi-GPU server solutions that already exist???
So not only was the title of this article completely wrong/false/misleading, the whole POINT of this "article" is made moot by the fact that this already exists in the server environment.
Therefore; there is literally NO point to this "article" at all.
tygrus - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
My 2L buzz box (car) wants it's Turbo intake/cooler back.A 250CFM airflow can move 700w with a 5C air temperature rise. The small heatsink would still be much hotter even with 350w of heat in real use. Diminishing returns. Water block to an external heatpump (like aircon) driven cooling would be better.
Skeptical123 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
I assume this was created for edge case workarounds and or to have something cool to show off in their booth. Though this type of cooling of PCIe cards may become a little more common if we start to run into issues/costs with newer generations of PCIe coming from pcb trace length limitations.JohnGee - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
I've used setups like this in the lab during bringup or other debugging where you needed the board outside the airflow of the chassis in order to attach probes.