Wednesday, June 10th 2020
NVIDIA Ampere Cooling Solution Heatsink Pictured, Rumors of Airflow Magic Quashed
Although still a blurry-cam pic, this new picture of three GeForce RTX 3080 "Ampere" graphics card reference heatsinks on a factory-floor reveals exactly how the cooling solution works. The main heat-dissipation component appears to be a vapor chamber base, above which there are four flattened copper heat pipes, which hold the cooler's four aluminium fin arrays together. The first array is directly above the CPU/memory/VRM area, and consists of a dense stack of aluminium fins that make up a cavity for the fan on the obverse side of the graphics card. This fan vents air onto the first heatsink element, and some of its air is guided by the heatsink to two trapezium shaped aluminium fin-stacks that pull heat from the flattened heat pipes, and get airflow from the obverse fan.
The heat pipes make their way to the card's second dense aluminium fin-stack. This fin-stack is as thick as the card itself, as there's no PCB here. This fin-stack is ventilated by the card's second fan, located on the reverse side, which pulls air through this fin-stack and vents upward. We attempted to detail the cooling solution, the card, and other SKU details in an older article. We've also added a picture of a Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 56 Pulse graphics card. This NVIDIA heatsink is essentially like that, but with the second fan on the other side of the card to make it look more complicated than it actually is.
Source:
LeeJiangLee (Reddit)
The heat pipes make their way to the card's second dense aluminium fin-stack. This fin-stack is as thick as the card itself, as there's no PCB here. This fin-stack is ventilated by the card's second fan, located on the reverse side, which pulls air through this fin-stack and vents upward. We attempted to detail the cooling solution, the card, and other SKU details in an older article. We've also added a picture of a Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 56 Pulse graphics card. This NVIDIA heatsink is essentially like that, but with the second fan on the other side of the card to make it look more complicated than it actually is.
60 Comments on NVIDIA Ampere Cooling Solution Heatsink Pictured, Rumors of Airflow Magic Quashed
www.techpowerup.com/forums/posts/4286266
Edit:Those fans look like they push air in opposite directions. I think pulling air "upwards" would be the more sensible option, but the pitch of the fan blades just don't look like they're optimised for pulling air...
but give me a big ass chunk of metal with thick heatpipes and three big slow spinning fans cause nothing is beating that mmm mm
all we have now is a100 which is +800mm2 7nm and it's 400w.
closest thing we can compare it to is v100 which is similar size but 300w 12nm
that means that we could actually see ampere cards that require a lot of power,I just don't think that'll be geforce.if they did plan 750mm2 dies again then maybe.but are they ?
it's just fancy.
I think there has to be a market for cards like that and nvidia knows that
I mean for god's sake their star wars titans and cp2077 rtx 2080Ti's sold like crazy.
just look at a100.this thing is 400w and 2.5x times transistor count of v100.
v100 was mere 1.50x of p100 and m60 to p100 was 1.875x
I just think it makes no sense for gaming cards.
call me crazy but I'm not even sure that next gen ge force is ampere.
they released an evolution of volta,an architecture that never made it into geforce line.
there was a line about ampere replacing turing,but that doesn't actually tell you it's in new gf cards.
water is less reliable and while it does tend to be quiet the aio pump noise isn't for everyone
Other than that, this looks a lot more believable than some theories based on the previous images, though I doubt there's a vapor chamber there given the presence of four thick heat pipes clearly bent so that they pass over the die. There's likely a base plate covering the die, VRAM and VRM, but I would be surprised if there was a vapor chamber with heatpipes stacked on top - that's rather redundant, adds a lot of cost for little real-world benefit. The core is the main heat producer, after all, and it's fully covered by the heatpipes. A simple aluminium or copper base plate takes care of the rest.
next tono airflow through it.There will be some, as the fins aren't nearly as dense as those directly surrounding the fans, but most of that air will take the quickest possible way out of the fin stack, leaving most of the middle/diagonal fin stacks with near zero flow.Nvm, didn't spot that the fins were entirely closed off. Passive VRM cooling fin stack?Still, as an SFF enthusiast I have to applaud Nvidia for moving to smaller reference PCBs. Should allow for some pretty nice AIB partner ITX cards, even if this cooler design will be terrible for sandwich style cases.
Edit: see above.
Dang this thing must be HOT
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-r9-nano.c2735
It's interesting that the R9 Nano loses only around 5% to the full R9 Fury X.