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What happened to aftermarket GPU coolers?

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GlacierNine

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I remember a time when it seemed like absolutely everyone did an aftermarket GPU cooler - I know Thermaltake did, Arctic did (And still do), hell, I had a Zalman cooler on my old 7600GT that was pretty nice, and lives on in a family member's rig.

But these days the field seems very thin - I actually only know of Arctic still selling aftermarket GPU coolers.

What's out there these days?
 
Rajintek morpheus is about the only other big player after Arctic.

I think GPU coolers are much better now than they used to be, which drove the need down. On top of that, AIO options exist, and many more people go to custom water cooled GPUs now too.
 
There was never really a huge market for Aftermarket coolers, They really only made sense on reference designs . In my opinion the modern AIB graphics cards coolers will work just as well as the units you mentioned. The other thing that in my opinion restricted this market is the fact that Water cooling of GPUs has risen in popularity and dropped in price in some markets over the years.

sneekypeet said:
Rajintek morpheus is about the only other big player after Arctic.

I think GPU coolers are much better now than they used to be, which drove the need down. On top of that, AIO options exist, and many more people go to custom water cooled GPUs now too.
Click to expand...

I guess we were typing at the same time :laugh:
 
GlacierNine said:
I remember a time when it seemed like absolutely everyone did an aftermarket GPU cooler - I know Thermaltake did, Arctic did (And still do), hell, I had a Zalman cooler on my old 7600GT that was pretty nice, and lives on in a family member's rig.
Click to expand...

I remember those days as well and those aftermarket coolers but there are two factors that brought them down;

1. most brands now offer a variant cooling solution over the stock cooler. My 7600GT was a single slot card with one fan, can't recall the last time I saw a mid-range single slot card as common as the 7600GT cards.

2. for the extra $50 or more for the after market cooler you can move up to a better card and better brand coolers since Nvidia (and AMD) has more cards at different price points then the old 7300GT, 7600GT, 7800GT days.
 
I use a Accelero 3 on my gtx 1080 its knocked 25c off from when I had the blower cooler on it ive the one with the backplate but ive also fitted copper heatsinks on the ram, no more throttling sits @ 2100 when playing VR. ive taken the white stickers of because thay look naff. cost £46 with the copper fins.
 
Assimilator said:
I honestly don't know how they're still in business.
Click to expand...

Arctic sells pretty good fans and they are usually the cheapest you can buy the F12 and F14 series are even capable of being daisy chained. People also still buy lot's of their thermal paste too. I do see about 5 listings on Amazon for single to triple fan GPU coolers so it looks like they have expanded the product stack too. I guess it makes sense if you are the only popular brand in the space. I know I bought Arctic fans because of my experience with their Thermal Paste. This one I found is interesting though.

Video Card Cooler, VF-1 Strong Magnesium Aluminum Case Graphics Card Cooler Video Card Heatsink Fan : Amazon.ca: Electronics

Video Card Cooler, VF-1 Strong Magnesium Aluminum Case Graphics Card Cooler Video Card Heatsink Fan : Amazon.ca: Electronics
www.amazon.ca
 
Coupla reasons:

1. In recent generations, nVidia cads have gotten so efficient, there's no market for something that isn't needed. And with AMD making great progress with latest gen, its a product w/o a real need.

2. They never really accomplished that much, oft making things worse by reducing cooling to the VRM / memory

3. While useful perhaps for reference cards, they rarely did much against the better AIB cards.... never say the logic of spending the time money on effort for an aftermarket cooler when for a smaller investment in each, you could just get a quality AIB card.

4. AIB cards would do a lot better except for the fact that they are nerfed by Boost 3.
 
They were relevant when GPU shrouds were more about cool looking artwork than actual cooling.
 
I think they had their heyday back when single slot cards with buzzy fans were still very common. One all the video card makers realized that people were willing to surrender another PCIe slot for a better cooler, it was all over for the aftermarket. Now almost everything has a dual-slot custom cooler with fan curves that are mindful of noise, or even a quiet mode BIOS switch. And as others have said, water is now the way to go for enthusiasts.
 
Using an Arctic Mono Plus, dropped my 1060 temps by 20*C, from 70*C to 50*C. Don't think I've seen it ever over 50*C since. Usually it sits at like 45 in game, depends on the game though. Pretty good deal since it cost me only $30. Stays in boost too.
 
A "GPU cooler" like this is always an option ...
 
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Vario said:
Using an Arctic Mono Plus, dropped my 1060 temps by 20*C, from 70*C to 50*C. Don't think I've seen it ever over 50*C since. Usually it sits at like 45 in game, depends on the game though. Pretty good deal since it cost me only $30. Stays in boost too.
Click to expand...

I had basically the same effect with the Arctic Mono Plus on my RX 480. 15 to 20c drop. Came with a bunch of RAM and VRM heatsinks too. Good deal.
Though I ended up chopping off the VRM portion of the factory heatsink and kept that.
 
SniperHF said:
I had basically the same effect with the Arctic Mono Plus on my RX 480. 15 to 20c drop. Came with a bunch of RAM and VRM heatsinks too. Good deal.
Though I ended up chopping off the VRM portion of the factory heatsink and kept that.
Click to expand...
Definitely worth it, the Mono Plus is a great heatsink. I took the Arctic fan off because it didn't like being run inverted and the bearings started to die, so I have a 140mm dual ball bearing Yate Loon fan from a power supply ziptied on top of the Arctic.
 
Basically. AIB partners stepped up their game in the cooling department and that destroyed what little marketshare, use and appeal that aftermarket coolers had. There are still a handful of situations where and aftermarket cooler might be a lot better - for instance. my 1080Ti was one of gigabytes 'Gaming OC' range and the cooler they had on their was extremely basic. to keep the card from going beyond 65'c would mean me cranking the fan speed up to 60-70% and by that time it is really loud. With my Accelero Xtreme IV it doesnt reach beyond 55'c unless im in a sauna and temperatures are 30'c ambient or above and even at 40% fan RPM i can barely hear it over my case fans ramping up during a gaming session.


Zalman ran into a lot of financial trouble some years back with their CEO or parent companies who wanted to throw the company under the bus as collateral but Zalman are still alive. but barely.
 
Arctic Cooling had nice Colors back then, black/white is so plain and boring.

Seems HIS had taken the Color palette from them
 
Why go trough the trouble of disassembling your reference card when you can buy AIB after market designed cards with good cooling and factory OC out of the box ?
 
Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:
Why go trough the trouble of disassembling your reference card when you can buy AIB after market designed cards with good cooling and factory OC out of the box ?
Click to expand...

Sometimes its not worth the price premium. you pay another 30% more for an extra 20-50mhz on the clocks that you can do yourself.
 
Was wondering the same thing. As I had problems with 1050Ti after being run for 4 years on SETi@home & now on Asteroids@home & GPUgrid. So the bearings were bad & it stopped working.
Good thing I was using Tthrottle to keep the card cool enough, not to overheat.

But right now I'm wondering if it's possible to change from 1050Ti single fan into 1050Ti dual fan?
Will the extra fan be OK from power usage point of view on 1050Ti?
Can i only exchange the cover with fan(s)?

Has anybody done such a work?
Or did you exchange towards the something like "aftermarket fan"? Found this one with 120W - Accelero L2 plus.
 
KLiKzg said:
Was wondering the same thing. As I had problems with 1050Ti after being run for 4 years on SETi@home & now on Asteroids@home & GPUgrid. So the bearings were bad & it stopped working.
Good thing I was using Tthrottle to keep the card cool enough, not to overheat.

But right now I'm wondering if it's possible to change from 1050Ti single fan into 1050Ti dual fan?
Will the extra fan be OK from power usage point of view on 1050Ti?
Can i only exchange the cover with fan(s)?

Has anybody done such a work?
Or did you exchange towards the something like "aftermarket fan"? Found this one with 120W - Accelero L2 plus.
Click to expand...

The L2 should work but you might want to use the measurements in this manual before making a purchase Its an older manual and in german but the measurements are there under compatibility and it tells you how to measure for it.

You are going to need to remove the current cooler too so just make sure you have some MX-4 or cheap PoS thermal paste handy for the time being if you are going to make a purchase.

People have also been known to just zip tie a regular fan on to their old cooler too when the fans break. Just remove the fans and the shroud and use zip ties to attach a 92-120mm fan on and run it at its lowest RPM. It will push a lot more air compared to the stock fan and fan on the L2 Plus
 
IMO the problem with modern GPUs is that the amount of stuff that requires dedicated cooling has gone up; In the early days the GPU die generated the lion's share of the heat and as long as you had a bit of airflow the VRAM packages and VRMs were cooled with minimal heatsinks.

These days, all three things require dedicated cooling with serious heat transfer (so heatpipes or heavy duty heatsinks) and the variable nature of where those things are positioned on different models of graphics card mean that designing a cooler that can effectively remove heat from 4-16 VRAM packages and a row of VRMs is damn near impossible.

Every single mid-tier AIB air-cooled card and above has a big old fin stack attached to some heatpipes or vapor-chamber that contacts the GPU die, but then they also have to add additional plates that make contact with the heatpipes or finstack that cover all of the VRAM packages as well as the VRM region(s) of the board. The size, orientation, and mounting locations for these additional plates is bespoke to each and every model made, the one exception being a reference board design - but even that is only applicable to one tier - the RTX2060 reference board is incompatible with the 2080Ti board, for example.

So an aftermarket air cooler that is genuinely equivalent to an AIB air cooler yet compatible with multiple models is going to need some kind of Lego-like assembly of VRAM heatsinks and heatpipes that are adjustable like in those 100% passive cases where loose heatpipes are clamped between blocks and thermal paste to connect CPU/GPU to the case chassis. It's going to be complicated, heavy, ugly, bulky, and expensive to make.

Let's assume you're okay with those downsides, you still don't get a backplate, universally-compatible fan headers on your GPU board, fan control, and (if you want that sort of thing) RGBLED,

So, previous aftermarket solutions worked because with only one item to cool (the GPU die) a single huge heatsink could be moved around so that it lined up with that GPU die and that provided cross-model compatibility. The solutions that do that today rely on tape or permanent epoxy to glue small, inadequate, isolated heatsinks onto the VRAM and VRMs - and we know from plenty of reviews that unless these seperate heatsinks or heatplates are connected to the rest of the fin stack by heatpipes, they overheat and suffer.

Why spend lots of money on a bad solution that won't be adequately cooling your VRAM and VRMs when the AIB's are custom-making solutions that do for much less money? When your AIB model fans die and the card is out of warranty, look at deshrouding the existing heatsink and finding a DIY solution to mount standard 92mm or 120mm fans to it instead - and if yuo can make use of the existing fan control header on the GPU board, even better!
 
Personally i think the problem was actually that universal coolers became harder to make - back in the day it was just the 4 screws and bam, you had a cooler. Then came RAMsinks, VRM's, backplates, and all these differing designs.


Even the best coolers suck compared to a lot of these upgraded ones, my 1080 sits around 40C full load with two slow RPM 140mm fans because i got sick of the fan noise in summer.
 
I agree with the fact it's become very hard to design universal cooler as there are plenty of clearance issues with VRM and PCB. Other than that I think custom AIB coolers have come a long way. Aftermarket GPU still exist, but for most people the AIB made one is already good.
I remember this one for my ATI Radeon 9700 PRO it made it so silent and so much cooler. I even had a passive one on my HD4850 that performed better than the stock one!
1598708993217.png1598709208186.png
 
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