Tuesday, December 12th 2023
ASUS Intros GeForce RTX 4070 Turbo Graphics Card with Lateral Flow Cooler
ASUS introduced the GeForce RTX 4070 Turbo, a performance segment graphics card with a lateral blower-type cooling solution that should make it ideal for restrictive airflow environments (such as a stack of them in an AI processing box). The card is strictly 2 slots thick, no taller than what constitutes full-height for addon cards (11.1 cm), and is 26.9 cm long. It lacks a backplate, so it could give a little more breathing room to its neighboring card. Its sole power connector, an 8-pin PCIe, is located at the tail end of the card, instead of the top, for additional clearance.
Internally, the ASUS Turbo RTX 4070 cooling solution features a copper base-plate, which conveys heat to an aluminium channel stack that's ventilated by a lateral blower. ASUS has given this blower a high endurance dual ball-bearing. The RTX 4070 GPU at the heart of the card runs at NVIDIA reference specs, with a 2475 MHz boost frequency, and a 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory speed. It features 12 GB of it across a 192-bit memory bus. There are two SMD switches on the card, the "Turbo" switch overrides software fan control and holds the fan on a steep fan-curve, hitting 100% even; while the VM_SW switch toggles between a "Quiet" and "Performance" mode, we don't know if this uses a dual-BIOS mechanism, or is a physical toggle for ASUS GPU Tweak software. ASUS didn't release pricing information.
Internally, the ASUS Turbo RTX 4070 cooling solution features a copper base-plate, which conveys heat to an aluminium channel stack that's ventilated by a lateral blower. ASUS has given this blower a high endurance dual ball-bearing. The RTX 4070 GPU at the heart of the card runs at NVIDIA reference specs, with a 2475 MHz boost frequency, and a 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory speed. It features 12 GB of it across a 192-bit memory bus. There are two SMD switches on the card, the "Turbo" switch overrides software fan control and holds the fan on a steep fan-curve, hitting 100% even; while the VM_SW switch toggles between a "Quiet" and "Performance" mode, we don't know if this uses a dual-BIOS mechanism, or is a physical toggle for ASUS GPU Tweak software. ASUS didn't release pricing information.
7 Comments on ASUS Intros GeForce RTX 4070 Turbo Graphics Card with Lateral Flow Cooler
Are they afraid it will actually be good with all copper inside.
Then they can't sell their overpriced side-venting 3-5% OC models then.
For a large ATX case with good cooling and a single GPU as the only add-in card, blowers are completely unneccessary. However, large ATX cases are not the only type or size of case that exists.
Only good this type of card was, they were cheaper and some chose them to yank the air cooler off and put a water block on.
Save a little cash.
Otherwise they were a sad joke oc'ing and cooling wise.
Within the limitations of a single-fan and two slots of exhaust, high end blowers used to be fantastic; high-quality bearings with 10yr lifespans, vapor chamber cooling, full-coverage cast or machined coldplate for all components that needed it, and of course the huge benefit that most of the waste heat was ejected directly outside the PC.
Realistically, the laws of physics prevented a single-fan card from being cool or quiet beyond about 200W. The 980FE and 1080FE were decently quiet in their own right and objectively, measurably quieter than larger open coolers when used in restrictive cases that could easily recycle hot exhaust air through the GPU heatsink.
For a 4070, a good quality blower cooler could easily be the best possible solution for some mITX builds, HTPCs, sound-dampened cases with restrictive intakes/exhausts, any system with more than one GPU at all, servers, renderfarms, etc. Hell, I'd buy them for workstations (if they didn't only have a gimpy 12GB VRAM) simply because they don't dump GPU waste heat into the more important CPU cooler.