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Blower Style or Open Air Cooler GPUs

jabbashouse

jabbashouse

jabbashouse

Associate
Joined
16 Sep 2016
Posts
13
Dear Overclocker Members,

As you have all helped me in the past I truly value all you're advise and completely take it all on board. I would appreciate some advice on the pros and cons of the following graphics cards 1070 or 1080, it doesn't matter which as I'm undecided yet on which I will get/afford.

My question is, what are the pros and cons of a Blower Style GPU and an Open Air Cooled GPU? and does the two perform differently when it comes to gaming? I take it a Blower Style GPU is also known as Founders Edition card.

Again thanks in advance I look forward to reading the replies.
 
Last edited:
A blower style fan forces hot air out of the back of the pc but tend to be noisy when under load.
Open air coolers don't do as good a job of forcing the hot air out of the case so depend more on better case cooling. In my (limited) experience, they tend to be a lot quieter and can cool better in terms of temp/noise ratio.
 
If you don't know you need a blower for sli or cheapest because your water cooling it, and your pc isnt a mile away from you and noise would be an issue then your looking for an non blower/reference
 
Generally speaking the aftermarket cards will perform better then the blower style cards. Simple reason being they can maintain a higher boost with stock fan profile they ship with, while Blower / FE cards will typically target and easily hit 83 degrees at which point the cards will adjust the clock speed, usually to a lower level to maintain 83 degrees.

The noise on FE cards with the stock profile is actually not too bad on pascal being a few DB higher then some of aftermarket cards, but once again this is due to the relatively low speed at which it spins which will limit boost. If you wanted to maintain a boost that aftermarket cards do out of the box, then you would need to ramp the fan up a fair bit at which point it can get noisy.

The Primary benefit of Founder Edition cards is that the air is mostly expelled out the rear of the case which proves somewhat ideal in very tight ITX cases or in tight SLI configs. For most builds however, so mid size tower with ATX board or no obstruction, pick up aftermarket like you MSI gaming X, EVGA SC etc.
 
Thank you for the advice i really do appreciate it.

So on that basis maybe you could give me advice on which would be better suited in terms of not overheating the internal case or with my current build (listed below) should I not really worry too much.

Case
Corsair Carbide 400c ATX Mid-Tower, Windowed side panel

Cooling
2x140 Riing Fans Top, exhaust blowers
1x120 Riing Fan Rear, exhaust blower

Motherboard
MSI Tomahawk Z270 (XMP on)

Ram
Corsair Vengeance 3000 at 16GB

CPU
i7700k (Letting XMP boost decide on how much it needs to OC the CPU)

Water cooling
ID Frostflow 240L (Mounted at the front of case)

GPU
1070 or 1080 (undecided as of yet)

PSU
Corsair 750M 80+ Gold, Modular

SSD/HHDs
120GB Corsair SSD (Windows 10)
1TB Seagate HHD

That's my current build at the moment, I'm just deciding on which style of gpu in terms of Blower or Open Air Cooled to get. Will I run into trouble with over heating? Or am I paying way too much attention to this and shouldn't worry?

Thanks everyone in advance.
 
There was a thread recently asking about blower coolers, you could search for it. In effect, blower coolers ironically... suck. Blower fans push out usually sub 10cfm of air where as the fans on a normal cooler generally will be 30-40cfm while silent, 70-90cfm while loud and you get 2 or even three of them.

Internal case temps increase marginally, CPUs barely lose any overclock if any at all from the increased temps. An open cooler design on a GPU will almost always run 15-20C cooler than a blower design while also doing it at a significantly lower noise level. Blower coolers aren't really good for anything at all in computers, they are designed to produce low airflow at a higher pressure, which you need when for instance you have a very long intake and exhaust pipe with very limited space, as maybe in a laptop or industrial applications.

Desktop cases, high power gpus, plenty of airflow available, blowers are in no situation, even in 4 gpu systems, the best option, 2 gpus or less, go with normal coolers, more than 2 gpus, you have the cash, go water, blowers will be terrible and normal coolers will be terrible in a 4 gpu system.
 
Having had a windforce non blower type 780ti I've noticed my 1070 Turbo which is a blower is considerably quieter even with the fans running @100% and I've noticed my cpu temps are a few degrees lower too because the hot air is being ejected from rather than blown into the case.
 
jabbashouse said:
Dear Overclocker Members,

As you have all helped me in the past I truly value all you're advise and completely take it all on board. I would appreciate some advice on the pros and cons of the following graphics cards 1070 or 1080, it doesn't matter which as I'm undecided yet on which I will get/afford.

My question is, what are the pros and cons of a Blower Style GPU and an Open Air Cooled GPU? and does the two perform differently when it comes to gaming? I take it a Blower Style GPU is also known as Founders Edition card.

Again thanks in advance I look forward to reading the replies.
Click to expand...

Blower for small/itx cases and Multi GPU

None blower for normal/large cases with a single GPU
 
Scania said:
Having had a windforce non blower type 780ti I've noticed my 1070 Turbo which is a blower is considerably quieter even with the fans running @100% and I've noticed my cpu temps are a few degrees lower too because the hot air is being ejected from rather than blown into the case.
Click to expand...

A 780ti is a considerably more power hungry card that dumps a lot more heat into a cooler. Also with any given card if a manufacturer puts on a bad heatsink or doesn't optimise fan speed for noise then it won't run quietly. In a like for like comparison, best normal cooler vs best blower cooler, best normal cooler wins hands down by an absolute mile.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1070_review,11.html

vs

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_780_ti_windforce_3x_review,7.html

suggests a 1070 uses 160W, the Windforce 3 uses 264W. The thing with CPU temps is they are largely irrelevant for most people. Back with a T-bird, an Ath 64, Phenoms and with 2.6Ghz base clock Q6600's, overclocking brought a huge amount of benefit in mins/max fps and temps were more sensitive. You could feel the difference in any game between 2.6Ghz and 3.3Ghz on a Q6600. Today you can't feel the difference between 4.5Ghz and 5Ghz, and even if you could, a few degrees won't make a difference to achieving that overclock. A couple degrees might knock you down from 5Ghz to 4.95Ghz.

However the thermal headroom to overclock a gpu further while still quiet on a good aircooler vs a blower cooler can give significant in game performance. When running very quietly you might find a better cooled 1070 will run much higher speeds without throttling at the same noise level.

For instance, http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_gtx_1070_gaming_x_review,11.html

shows it running what 7C lower in temp while also 2dba quieter which is a significant reduction in noise. At the same noise level with more airflow it would likely run 15C cooler. This is also while being preoverclocked and using 25W more at stock settings.
 
I use a msi areo gtx 1070 blower style. It peaks around 71c with custom fan curve that isn't insanely aggressive, noise not too bad as result and performs well. Plus the added benefit of 90% of hot air expelled out the back. Great card imo.
 
There's a misconception that AIB cards (non-blower) dump air into the case. It's true, but the air is actually expelled out of the heat sink out of the edge that the power connectors are on. For this reason, if you have a case with a side extraxt fan then you're actually getting the best of both worlds.

I had 2 980 G1 Gaming cards SLI in a Coolermaster CM690 II with a side extract fan, both cards were on air and the max temperature was something like 65C.

I did a post somewhere about that, I'll see if I can dig it out.
 
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