Colorful Announces GeForce RTX 2080 Sans Cooler for Waterblock Afficionados

[Raevenlord]

Colorful will be offering a cooler-less version of their RTX 2080 iGame Vulcan Advanced graphics card. The engineering effort on this graphics card is simple: just take off the entire triple-fan cooling solution that usually ships with the graphics card, lower the pricing by the appropriate reduction in BOM costs (or close to it), and offer a slightly cheaper alternative for users that would be investing in a watercooling solution anyway.

Colorful, being one of the biggest players in the Chinese market, where iCafes are all the rage, offers these particularly interesting cooler-less versions for those businesses that want to keep heat dissipation through the room to a minimum. It seems the graphics card' design closely mimics that of NVIDIA's reference deign, which should maximize waterblock compatibility.



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[Wavetrex]

Plot twist:
Somebody buys this, puts it in the case, powers it on.... watches the magic smoke come out.

Extract from tech support call:
"Oh, I needed to put a cooler on it???"

 

[Nephilim666]

This is great, I hope other manufacturers follow suit!

 

[dozenfury]

I'd be all for this, but I can't imagine their raw cost on just the cooler could affect the price very much. There is a little less labor and less shipping weight, but I'd kind of be surprised if they can knock off even $50 doing this. And tbh, if I'm watercooling it won't be a Colorful card. Also if it's only like $30 difference, I'd just pay for the model with fan+hs and hang on to the cooler for resale value when I sell the card later. Buyers on the used market will want a cooler and fan I have found when selling cards.

I do like the idea, it's just kind of like Intel the processors without the iGPU historically leaving features out of IT equipment doesn't usually reduce price as much as it should (or at all in the case of Intel).

 

[Supercrit]

Plot twist:
Somebody buys this, puts it in the case, powers it on.... watches the magic smoke come out.

Extract from tech support call:
"Oh, I needed to put a cooler on it???"

It should have a giant warning on the box requiring a cooler to use.

 

[atomicus]

I'd be all for this, but I can't imagine their raw cost on just the cooler could affect the price very much. There is a little less labor and less shipping weight, but I'd kind of be surprised if they can knock off even $50 doing this. And tbh, if I'm watercooling it won't be a Colorful card. Also if it's only like $30 difference, I'd just pay for the model with fan+hs and hang on to the cooler for resale value when I sell the card later. Buyers on the used market will want a cooler and fan I have found when selling cards.

I do like the idea, it's just kind of like Intel the processors without the iGPU historically leaving features out of IT equipment doesn't usually reduce price as much as it should (or at all in the case of Intel).

Per card no, but it adds up... and cumulatively it's a big saving when you factor in the labour costs saved in not having to put the cooler on in the first place, and the time it then takes get off the production line and out the door, plus weight savings with shipments... again, per card it's not a great deal, but thousands of GPUs... it's significant.

I'm surprised no one has done this before... perhaps lack of demand and watercooling being relatively niche. Good idea though.

 

[hyp36rmax]

Great idea! I wish all my gpu's came this way since i usually waterblock all of them. Currently have a bin full of unused air coolers.

 

[Patriot]

it's a shame the dvi isn't a ribbon cable so that you could make it single slot.

 

[johnspack]

I'm just wondering what the purpose of water cooling on new cards is. Since pascal ocing headroom is minimal, serious cooling, barring ln2 ect, you won't get higher ocing with water cooling.
Are the multiple fans on a rad quieter than the multiple fans on a video card? Since rtx series is just pascal with rt sewn in, I doubt they oc much better. So it just for the noise factor?

 

[hyp36rmax]

I'm just wondering what the purpose of water cooling on new cards is. Since pascal ocing headroom is minimal, serious cooling, barring ln2 ect, you won't get higher ocing with water cooling.
Are the multiple fans on a rad quieter than the multiple fans on a video card? Since rtx series is just pascal with rt sewn in, I doubt they oc much better. So it just for the noise factor?

My use case for waterblocking GPU's is to lower core temps minimizing throttling at load for consistent performance. I also prefer it aesthetically. For the most part Pascal has a hard stop performance ceiling.

 

[Ubersonic]

This is great, I hope other manufacturers follow suit!

The interesting thing is that manufacturers have always maintained that they would like to offer this but Nvidia won't allow it, I wonder what's changed.

 

[robal]

I've been waiting for this for years...

 

[BadFrog]

how do they test the cards before they ship w/o the cooler?

 

[BakerMan1971]

This is a great idea, by removing the possibility of damage by cooler removal I think their warranty returns on modded cards would go down. Its a nice little easy road for end users too

 

[nickbaldwin86]

how do they test the cards before they ship w/o the cooler?

You put a cooler on it and test it... why would it matter? you dont have to test hardware with air

Only reason I ever tested hardware because of the worry of removing that big air cooler and then the hardware not working. This shouldn't be an issue with this card because you don't have a cooler to remove.

It if doesn't suit then...don't buy it