Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Blower vs Open-Air – Which one should you buy? – GPU Cooling Comparison”.
Hello and welcome to tech deals today I want to talk to you about different cooling solutions for graphics cards in front of me. I have gone a pair of nvidia geforce, gtx 1070 graphics cards. I have previously done an unboxing and overview of these cards separately. Links to both of those videos will be in the video description below, but this video was about the different coolers. The one on the left here is a reference card. This has got nvidia z’ reference, blower style, cooler on it on the right. We have EVGA z’ new, a CX 3.0 custom cooler, which one should you buy.
It depends I can recommend these for different uses in different people. Let’S talk about the reference card. First, the blower style cooler. First of all, while this is an EVGA card, these comments are not EVGA specific, and that also goes for the custom cooling.
First of all, all these blower style coolers are basically the same, because they’re all provided by nvidia directly. This is the reference design. The custom coolers are different, but the reality is they all basically do the same thing with the blower style. Cooler it sucks air into the single fan.
Runs it horizontally along the card here across these cooling fins. The actual chip is under the fins not under the fan, and then it exhaust the air out. The vents in the back. The benefit to this system is that most of the heat – not all of it, but most of the heat that the card generates, is directly expelled up the back of your computer. It does not go inside your machine where it competes with the heat generated from your. Your CPU, your memory, your hard drive and the other components of your machine.
The downside is it’s one fan instead of two or three, and because it’s one fan it has to blow air across the length and expel it out of fairly small vents out the back. They do tend to be slightly louder than the custom coolers. They also don’t tend to cool as well. Temperatures are usually 5 to 10 degrees Celsius, hotter on a reference card than they are on a custom card, and the maximum performance of the card is usually 5 to 10 % slower. Now, having just said that, you might ask why in the world, would anyone buy a reference card, a blower style? Why wouldn’t everybody buy the custom? Well, you a lot of people would say that and if you go to tech message boards, if you talk to to to computer savvy people, many of them will instinctively respond.
Oh forget: the reference cards always go. Custom hang on a second. Let me make an argument for the reference card: do you own a pre-built computer? Do you own a machine from a big-name company such as Acer, Zeus, Lenovo Dell HP? Did you buy a computer in a box, put it on your desk, plug it and turn it on and start using it? You may not want that card. You may not want the custom one and the reason for that is most pre-built. Machines do not have great cooling, there are exceptions, but most don’t. As an example. I recently reviewed a very nice gaming computer from a certs called the Acer.
Predator g36 excuse me, 7:10, a $ 750 gaming machine that comes with a 500 watt power supply and a gtx 950 graphics card. It’S an entry-level graphics card from the previous generation. However, it came with a good processor at a good case and a good power supply, and that machine is an excellent candidate for something like this. Here’S the problem.
However, while it had decent cooling, it had a couple of fans in it, they weren’t big fans and they certainly didn’t have a lot of them and there was no vent out the top. If you put this card the custom cooler in there, all the heat from that card is going to be circulating inside the machine, and the reason for that is because the heat does not exit out the back of the card on the custom coolers. It leaves via the top and the bottom, and that is because the cooling fins are aligned vertically, instead of horizontally, these fans blow air directly onto these fins, which then exhaust out the top and the bottom, not the back. If you put this into a case, that does not have good cooling that does not have multiple fans and intake in the front and exhaust in the back and preferably vent grilles on the top to exhaust heat out of you run the risk of your whole computer.
Overheating I have personally seen this happen. I try to install a GTX 970, the predecessor to this card, a 970 into a dell inspiron pre-built machine. The only fan in the computer was in the power supply. There were no other fans, there were vent holes, their event, holes in the front behind the plastic and there was vent holes in the back.
But there’s no fans. The computer ran fine in Windows, but when you launched a game within about 5 minutes, the computer shut down due to heat. If you felt this out of the case, the case was hot to the touch it was noticeably hot. I replaced that card, which was one of these style coolers with a blower problem solved works perfectly to this day. It’S been that way now for over a year, the problem was heat. So that’s the argument for the blower style coolers. Now, if you don’t own a pre-built system, if you have a custom machine, you built yourself if you bought a mid tower to full tower case and you have multiple fans, maybe an intake fan in the front and exhaust fan in the back vents on the top. For the ventilation of heat by all means by the custom cooler it’s faster, it runs the chip, cooler and it over clocks higher, no doubt in my mind whatsoever.
That is absolutely the way to go. So the purpose of this video is to explain that there’s not a right or wrong answer to reference card or custom cooler. It depends on your unique situation. What kind of machine you have and where you’re installing it was this video helpful, give it a like? Was it not that’s, ok, to remember to subscribe to my channel it’s the big huge red button down there. I’Ve got lots of upcoming videos with both of these cards, including, and that’s the light configuration where I put two of them together and do some testing I’ll be doing testing of both 1440p and 4k that’ll be a lot of fun. Questions comments, thoughts, feedback suggestions, those go below the video description below and speaking of the video description, I now have links to both Amazon and Newegg. In my videos, they are both affiliate links and they do both pay me a small Commission, but it is my primary funding source for these videos. I did not get either one of these sent to me for free.
I bought both of these. In fact, they both came to me the past couple of days, which is why I’m doing these videos. Now I buy everything I review on my channel and if you want to support me, if you like the videos that I do to how-to guides the performance guides. The best way to support me is to use the links in my description below it doesn’t change your cost in any way, but it certainly helps me out, and I will be very grateful. Thank you very much for watching. I will see you in the next article .