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
Unfortunately, most people do not take care of their rigs as much as they should.
Such boards are just to validate, set clocks etc and determine best power / performance ratio, as it was or is capped at 450W.
Imagine if AMD had GPU's with a heatsink that covered the GPU, VRM's and VRAM with a flat plate that fit any AM4/AM5 cooler with screw holes, and they just gave out recommendations on what to use and a few big warnings that it required a cooler (or 3rd party cards could obviously include their own branded one, that suddenly was user replaceable)
You'd suddenly get 300 aftermarket air coolers with that standard size, and since the VRM's and VRAM were cooled by simple old metal, that part would never need replacing - just the modular fan/AIO part.
(And then people would go slap noctua air coolers on them, because hell yeah)
The most sad story is actually we only generate e-waste by doing like that with each generation. Bloody corporate mind does not get the idea that we are screwing up hard our environment and do not properly reuse our resources.
There is no regulator that can force something about it either way.
I agree with the principle just the same but do I want the hassle... no.
It should be dealt with through regulation and standardization. But this is a niche luxury item really
Nvidia market share even in discrete gaming is higher than it's ever been. Go figure
PC consumer products should be treated the same way actually... but it happens rarely. Just e-waste.
As for other manufacturers, well pretty much every major (r)etailer offers exchange programs here & relatively good prices, so no Apple's not special in that sense!
www.amazon.in/mobile-phones/b/?ie=UTF8&node=1389401031&ref_=nav_cs_mobiles
www.amazon.in/s?bbn=976393031&rh=n%3A976392031%2Cn%3A1375424031&dc&rnid=976393031&ref=lp_976393031_nr_n_4
But nevertheless the main point it does not get into landfill. Recycling that way is expensive in EU and should be banned, so you will have to pay, not vice versa.
But the idea remains, it would be great if you could trade in your old geforce for a radeon card and get a discount. It would be just normal...