Weird usage of space with gpus.

Cleffy

I got my rtx 3090, and it's going to be a month before water blocks are out for it, so I decided to run it on air for now to make sure it works. I put it in then realized it's 2 inches longer than the Vega Frontier Edition which is already a very long card. I think Msi did it so they can have 3 fans, but the 3rd fan is all but useless. The first 2 fans cool the fins for the gpu and memory. The third fan has heat pipes leading to other components on the pcb, and it's sitting over a blank area of the board.
When I looked at the Vega Frontier Edition pcb more closely, there is a good 4 inches of just blank pcb with 2 capacitors and the 2 8-pin connectors. It's were the blower fan would typically fit. Considering it used hbm2 memory, the card itself could be very short, but the pcb is longer to accommodate fans and cooling fins. 

It got me wondering why more manufacturers don't use this space better with more creative cooling solutions like the Fury X. 

Ridelynn

Those heat pipes are cooling something. So that third fan is doing some real work for you. 

Vrika

Ridelynn said:

Those heat pipes are cooling something. So that third fan is doing some real work for you. 

This.

If you think about all the big air-coolers for CPUs. Most powerful of them do not blow air towards the CPU at all, they're built so that their fans just blow air on their own heatpipes.

Quizzical

So basically, you need a really big cooler to handle a 350 W video card, or more if it's overclocked.

Ridelynn

Yeah 350W is a lot of heat to dissipate. Your water cooler can do it in a small area, because water is amazing stuff, but you need a lot of surface area with air.