Founders Edition Cooler

As mentioned earlier, NVIDIA no longer slates its "reference design" to be a baseline for AIC partners to build on, but rather a high standard in design and performance for partners to strive for. The GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 implement an innovative new air-based cooling solution which sees two independent airflow channels and the presence of a fan on either side of the card.


The fan on the obverse side (you'll have to excuse the numismatics jargon here) has been put directly over the GPU and pushes air through an aluminium fin stack, which guides the heated exhaust out through the vents of the rear IO bracket. The fan on the reverse side pulls cool air in, sends it through the card's second aluminium fin stack, and exhausts it in an area where a typical gaming desktop's rear exhaust fan vents air out of the case.


NVIDIA detailed how they simulated certain in-case airflow situations and realized that air needs to travel "through" the graphics card for it to flow in the most optimal pattern for standard case fan configurations.


To achieve this, the PCB is shorter than the card, and nearly one-thirds of the length of the fan is just the second aluminium fin stack. As a concept, this kind of cooler design isn't entirely new. The Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 56 Pulse uses a similar airflow concept, although both fans are on the obverse side. Both aluminium fin stacks on the Ampere FE cooler are skewered by four copper heat pipes which converge at a vapor chamber plate that serves as the primary contact point for nearly all hot components on the obverse side of the PCB—GPU, memory, VRM, etc. The RTX 3090 is essentially a scaled-up version of this cooler, except that its back-plate has to cool an additional set of memory chips along the reverse side of the PCB.

Both cooler fans have independent speed control (spin at different speeds from each other), but NVIDIA didn't say if they feature idle fan stop. We'll answer this question in our performance review. The fan impellers are webbed along the edges, similar to the Axial-Tech fans by ASUS. These fans guide all their airflow axially, and none of it is bled laterally. The idea is to get let the tapered fins in the fin stacks guide the air.


These claims in thermal performance are highly promising. The new cooler will be able to run much cooler and quieter than previous Founders Edition cards—even at higher heat loads.

PCB Design

For a card of this performance class, the NVIDIA Founders Edition PCB of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 is shockingly compact, similar to AMD flagship cards that use MCM GPUs with HBM, except that the PCB has a massive GPU package at its heart, surrounded by up to 12 GDDR6X memory chips, and an extremely dense VRM solution. PCB real estate is at such a premium due to NVIDIA's decision to use that air cross-flow design that the company had to come up with a very innovative VRM solution.

For starters, the massive 20-phase VRM relies on both sides of the PCB in a big way. The chokes and DrMOS are on the obverse side of the PCB, while most of the tantalum capacitors are on the reverse side. The next big innovation is the power input. The RTX 3090 has 350 W typical board power, which is high and takes two 8-pin PCIe power inputs (150 W per input) and reliance on slot power. For any meaningful overclocking headroom, a third 8-pin connector is needed. We don't have that kind of space on this PCB.

NVIDIA turned to Molex, the experts in connector and slot design, for a solution. Enter the 12-pin Molex MicroFit connector. This connector is roughly the size of a single 8-pin PCIe connector, can be oriented sideways on a PCB to occupy the same PCB footprint as a 2-pin DC power brick input, and has an enormous power delivery headroom of 300 watts! This is possible mostly because higher gauge wire is used, as well as enhancements to the pins and contacts. NVIDIA allows its AIC partners to use the connector; however they are required to bundle a 2x 8-pin to 1x 12-pin adapter cable with their cards. NVIDIA doesn't even restrict AMD or Intel from using this connector in their future graphics cards.