ASRock Launches AMD Radeon RX 7900 Passive Series Graphics Cards

[phanbuey]

windtunnel sold separately.

I got some 2U servers that this would be nice in. I wanted to try to create a shared graphics server for my kids. This seems like a nice GPU to carve up for VMs, plenty of power.

Doesn't that overhead crush performance though? What are u using to host the vms?

 

[thesmokingman]

I guess these will still need a tornado like server fan to blow air trough them. So "passive" seems not the wisest choice of word.

Don't forget the massive AC to go with it.

 

[Patriot]

Thanks, I hate it.

Most 7900-series cards are 2.5 or 3-slot designs, so the equivalent blower should be 3.5 or 4-slot blower.

That piddly little thing looks like it's going to struggle with a 200W TDP at any fan speed, let alone acceptable noise levels - the heatsink fins aren't even full length!


Not as useful as you think. The static pressure of an axial fan is nowhere near enough to drive air through such a long column of fins, hence the radial/centrifugal fans normally fitted to blower-style coolers.

When you see a pressure-optimised axial fan like the Phanteks T30 or Gentle Typhoon, they're geared towards a 20-30mm radiator or air-cooler's tower stack, and you still have to double them up or push-pull to get the best results. The fin stacks on these blower cards are usually 5-10x longer than that, and turbulent airflow for efficient heat exchange drop off with distance according to an exponential decay curve.

As a rough figure, the "pressure optimised" axial fans have 2-3x the static pressure of a typical case fan, but for a blower you need order(s) of magnitude (50-200x) more pressure. 2-3x more pressure might as well be nothing at all. Take this with a grain of salt because these are only my rough estimates but I do have a background in computational fluid dynamics, even I'm pretty rusty.

Yep... I have designed and printed baffles for my mi100s to blowers, axials simply do not have near enough static pressure unless we are talking about double stacked 38mm 15k rpm axials found in servers.
But my 5-7w blowers keep the mi100s cool... don't need 25w double stacked axials for that.

 

[swaaye]

It just looks like a card that slots into a server chassis that would have the front-to-back airflow it would need.

 

[Patriot]

It just looks like a card that slots into a server chassis that would have the front-to-back airflow it would need.

That is 100% what these are. Kind of surprised they opted for the 24gb version and not 48gb pro version.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Thanks, I hate it.

Most 7900-series cards are 2.5 or 3-slot designs, so the equivalent blower should be 3.5 or 4-slot blower.

That piddly little thing looks like it's going to struggle with a 200W TDP at any fan speed, let alone acceptable noise levels - the heatsink fins aren't even full length!

Blowers aren't going to handle much more without becoming screamers, anyway. RTX 4070 @ 200 W TDP and much fewer memory chips to manage is probably about as far as I'd take a blower design. Navi 31 is probably the last GPU design I'd want to see in a blower, it's GTX 480 levels of wrong.

 

[Chrispy_]

Blowers aren't going to handle much more without becoming screamers, anyway. RTX 4070 @ 200 W TDP and much fewer memory chips to manage is probably about as far as I'd take a blower design. Navi 31 is probably the last GPU design I'd want to see in a blower, it's GTX 480 levels of wrong.

Sure they do. My house is heated and cooled by a massive 170W centrifugal Bosch fan that pushes air relatively quietly through a heat exchanger that's around 60x20x20cm. My Nibe heat exchanger is rated at 1300W at full fan speed, but I've turned mine down a bit so that I can't hear it from the next room - I'd guess it's running at about 900W quite unobtrusively.

The problem isn't blowers themselves, the problem is that vendors didn't bother making larger blowers to keep up with the larger open coolers they were slapping on GPUs. The dual-slot blowers basically cap out at 200W before noise levels become an annoyance, and unfair on blowers to compare them to a dual-slot open cooler, since axial fans need way more intake clearance that blowers don't, and they obviously don't put much strain on the rest of the cooling in your system because there's no hot exhaust into the case.

For a single GPU in a full ATX case, that clearance which axial fans require doesn't really matter but for SFF builds it's a dealbreaker - meaning that apples-to-apples comparison in a space-constrained environment, a 1.5-slot open cooler is a fair comparison to a 2-slot blower. Give me a 4-slot blower on my 300W GPU please, I can run the rest of the case fans at whisper quiet and the blower ought to be very modest if it's large enough.

 

[Dr. Dro]

The problem isn't blowers themselves, the problem is that vendors didn't bother making larger blowers to keep up with the larger open coolers they were slapping on GPUs.

We've got the "blower bad mmmkay" crowd to thank for that one.

 

[Caring1]

Fitting water cooling would be fairly easy, if these cards are cheap enough.
Otherwise get a blower fan.

 

[basco]

it's GTX 480 levels of wrong

Tell this my zotac gtx480 amp with zalman - she is crying now