Tuesday, August 1st 2023
A Closer Look at NVIDIA's Cinder Block Sized Air Cooler for RTX 4090 Ti—22 Heatpipes
Amidst reports that NVIDIA has shelved plans to release a new flagship RTX 40-series graphics card to top the current RTX 4090, we are getting even more pictures of the company's ingenious product design for what could have been the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, or RTX TITAN (Ada). Pictures of the card's cooling solution has been in the news since January 2023, with more images surfacing in June. We are getting our first images of the cooler disassembled, revealing a startling look at the engineering effort NVIDIA put into this thing.
As we mentioned earlier, the "RTX 4090 Ti" features a unique ruler-shaped PCB that's oriented along the plane of the motherboard, rather than perpendicular to it, like any other add-on card. This is to minimize the spatial footprint of the PCB, and maximize volume for the cooler—which is 4 slots, thick, with its entire thickness dedicated to heat-dissipation, and no obstruction posed by the PCB.
Disassembling the cooler reveals that it has a large, continuous aluminium fin-stack spanning the entire length of the card. These fins are along the plane of the motherboard, just like the card's PCB. A jaw-dropping 22 heatpipes pull heat from the base plate that makes contact with all hot components on the PCB, including the GPU, VRM, and memory; spreading heat along the fin-stack.
The base-plate (from an older article), is a large continuous block of nickel-plated copper, with mirror finish over the contact-points where the card's "AD102" GPU, twelve GDDR6X memory chips, and numerous DrMOS components make contact with the card. It is from here that the 22 heatpipes pull heat.
There are a total of three fans—one of them is an intake located toward the obverse side of the card, which draws in fresh air; one of them is toward the tail-end, pulling hot air through the fin-stack, and exhausting through the reverse side of the card; the third one is a conveyor fan, located bang in the middle of the fin-stack, its airflow intersects both the other fans. The airflow from all three fans goes right through the fin-stack, unobstructed by the PCB along the way.
The RTX 4090 Ti has three breakout components besides the PCB. The first of these is a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 finger that's perpendicular to the PCB, so the card slots into your motherboard like just another add-on card. The second component is a satellite PCB located along the top of the card, with its 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector.
The third component is an innovative new cable that connects the power receptacle PCB with the card's main PCB. This is a series of two flattened non-braided copper cables conveying the 12 V DC power from the connector to the PCB in a 2-pin format. Each of the two cables is capable of 600 W continuous delivery, along with excursions within the ATX 3.0 specification. Besides the two power cables, you have the four signal pins from the 12VHPWR being conveyed to the PCB using a thinner set of cables.
NVIDIA went through all this trouble to create a cooling solution capable of taming a maxed out "AD102" GPU with all its 72 TPCs (144 SM) or 18,432 CUDA cores enabled. The card would find its place in NVIDIA's product stack had the Radeon RX 7900 XTX posed a threat to the RTX 4090 (it doesn't). It remains to be seen by how much AMD pushes up the performance of the already maxed out "Navi 31" GPU in the upcoming Radeon RX 7950 XTX, so NVIDIA could find a reason to respond with this card.
Source:
harukaze5719 (Twitter)
As we mentioned earlier, the "RTX 4090 Ti" features a unique ruler-shaped PCB that's oriented along the plane of the motherboard, rather than perpendicular to it, like any other add-on card. This is to minimize the spatial footprint of the PCB, and maximize volume for the cooler—which is 4 slots, thick, with its entire thickness dedicated to heat-dissipation, and no obstruction posed by the PCB.
There are a total of three fans—one of them is an intake located toward the obverse side of the card, which draws in fresh air; one of them is toward the tail-end, pulling hot air through the fin-stack, and exhausting through the reverse side of the card; the third one is a conveyor fan, located bang in the middle of the fin-stack, its airflow intersects both the other fans. The airflow from all three fans goes right through the fin-stack, unobstructed by the PCB along the way.
The RTX 4090 Ti has three breakout components besides the PCB. The first of these is a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 finger that's perpendicular to the PCB, so the card slots into your motherboard like just another add-on card. The second component is a satellite PCB located along the top of the card, with its 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector.
The third component is an innovative new cable that connects the power receptacle PCB with the card's main PCB. This is a series of two flattened non-braided copper cables conveying the 12 V DC power from the connector to the PCB in a 2-pin format. Each of the two cables is capable of 600 W continuous delivery, along with excursions within the ATX 3.0 specification. Besides the two power cables, you have the four signal pins from the 12VHPWR being conveyed to the PCB using a thinner set of cables.
NVIDIA went through all this trouble to create a cooling solution capable of taming a maxed out "AD102" GPU with all its 72 TPCs (144 SM) or 18,432 CUDA cores enabled. The card would find its place in NVIDIA's product stack had the Radeon RX 7900 XTX posed a threat to the RTX 4090 (it doesn't). It remains to be seen by how much AMD pushes up the performance of the already maxed out "Navi 31" GPU in the upcoming Radeon RX 7950 XTX, so NVIDIA could find a reason to respond with this card.
83 Comments on A Closer Look at NVIDIA's Cinder Block Sized Air Cooler for RTX 4090 Ti—22 Heatpipes
I dont know how to explain but waste of materials like bulk waste.
Uses more power than most people's PC's typical total system power draw.
Heatsink is a meme that needs an actual pillar to support the card to make sure it doesn't rip the PCIe socket out of the motherboard.
From specs alone, it's around a maximum of 15% faster than the 4090 non-Ti.
Will almost certainly be 20-40% more expensive than the 4090 non-Ti, making it at least $2,000.
This is the biggest E-peen of a piece of PC hardware I've ever seen.
More wires for AIO is a myth and depends entirely on the manufacturer. It's possible to combine all wires into one like Arctic does with theirs instead of the rats nest Corsair ships with. It would be even possible to make a solution where the fans/pump take power from the card itself with no external power needed.
Have you seen latest HSF designs? Nvidia FE's are over engineered with tens of different size screws and glue. Taking apart HSF card may end up being much more of a hassle than removing a waterblock. And why would you need to remove the entire AIO to dismount the PCB from the block? Assuming the tubes are long enough there is usually no reason to remove the entire AIO even for repasting.
No there are more cases against HSF's. Like weight. Complexity. Dimensions inside the case (blocking M.2, SATA and other motherboard slots or ports). Some manufacturers even had to engineer a solution to release the PCIe clamp with a separate button because people could not reach it with massive aircoolers in the way. Also HSF may be harder to clean because of the massive finstack that accumulates a lot of dust.
The main benefit of AIO's aside from cooling performance is that they shift bulk of the radiator mass closer to exhaust and the radiator itself is actually lighter than HSF.
When i bought my 420mm AIO for CPU i was surprised at how light it was considering the dimensions. This should come as no suprise because radiators have to be hollow where as HSF's rely on massive heatpipes and finstacks that are not hollow. Also with AIO it's easier to work inside the computer and it's safer to transport it without worring about the massive weight secured only by the PCIe slot and 1-2 screws flying around during transport. Another advantage is that unlike HSF's the heat is not dumped inside the case and could be efficently ejected.
To each their own but both have valid use cases and downsides. Sub 300W can be reasonably cooled by air coolers but IMHO going above that it is undeniable that water is a superior heat conductor.
like make it easy to hook into a loop and sell it with a block
A leak with non-conductive fluid is much less fatal than PCB cracking - i've had tubes pop off and doused my computer with distilled water and antifreeze while it was on, and did no damage to the hardware (it was scary af don't get me wrong). But right now there's a gigabyte set of cards cracking PCBs due to the sheer weight of the cooler and a mounting design issue.
As for the support, being a quad-slot design most likely fares better than standard double-slot ones. Thicker beam = less bending (on all axes). And the cantilever support at rear would be definitely designed to be more than adequate at handling shear and bending stresses.I wasn't saying that more wires is bad. That was Ferrum Master's argument. I merely pointed out that aircoolers have less wires. This isn't a myth. Except for the case where radiators don't have fans (why?), a typical watercooler has two sets of wires because it has two electrical components: pumps and fans, compared to only fans in an air cooler.
Indeed, OEMs can be crafty with their wiring like you proposed, but then they'd be losing one of the advantages an AIO has: Ease of replacing (radiator) fans."Assuming tubes are long enough."
They rarely (never?) are. And for good reason. Longer tubes add cost and reduce performance.
I've seen someone who worked with an (CPU) AIO with the rad still mounted. This ended up putting too much stress on the joints and it ended up leaking.
The 4000 gen cards don't use glue. Disassembly of 4090 FE cooler can, to quote W1zzard: "be done in a few minutes."
And similarly to the wires point, repasting wasn't something I mentioned (or even believe to be an issue worth mentioning). I don't believe anyone should need to take apart a card unless they're modding or something.Valid points. But I'd argue that motherboard ports aren't typically hot pluggable (except for SATA). So an aircooler would only affect the order of fitting components/cables at install time.
[Disclaimer: Not saying the next in defense of aircoolers, just ranting] Whoever though placing m.2 slots bellow PCIe slots should be banned from ever designing a board. Stupid, stupid placement that ends up forcing users to either leave the slot unused or suffer shitty temps!
Just placed the case horizontal on the table. Unlocked the window (toolless). Unscrewed the cooler block from the CPU (4 screws). Repasted the CPU.
Held up the tubes with one hand to prevent the liquid from spilling out and unscrewed the coldplate (also 4 screws) with one hand. Replaced the old gasket. Added some liquid just in case. Placed the new coldplate on top and screwed in the 4 screws. Peeled away the coldplate plastic sticker. Placed it back on the CPU and screwed in the 4 screws. Window back on and case vertical again. Job done.
Tubes are long enough that i was able to hold the cooling block comfortably outside the case without damaging the tubes or spilling coolant everywhere.
And it performs among the top AIO's despite the (longer than average?) tubes and actually costs less than many competitors. My 420mm unit was only a few € over 100€.