NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Flagships Could Feature 4-Slot Coolers with Triple-Fan Reference Designs

Tsing

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NVIDIA's next flagship graphics cards will definitely require more substantial cooling solutions, according to the latest claims by leaker kopite7kimi, who took to Twitter today and stated that NVIDIA has opted to develop a four-slot, triple-fan cooler for the reference board of the AD102, the Ada-based GPU that will be powering the GeForce RTX 4090 and other future flagship models of the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

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I'm remembering back when I had two triple slot Asus Radeon HD 6970 DirectCU II's in my system in CrossFire.
If was fun, but the GPU's took up a total of six PCIe slots :p

inside case.jpg

Just to be clear, the entire scale of the thing is thrown off because those intake fans on the bottom are 180mm fans.

I bought a specialty CoolIT 180mm AIO from MainGear (the biggest AIO money could buy at the time) only because they made a mistake, with more radiator volume than a 240mm AIO, it was the biggest volume AIO money could buy at the time.. Turns out their contract only allowed them to sell the cooler as part of systems, but I got one anyway :p It allowed my Phenom II X6 1090T to hit 4.2Ghz, which was pretty awesome back then. I had to take a goddamn hacksaw to that case and saw away parts of the motherboard tray in order to fit the 180mm cooler and two fans in push-pull :p

I think that's the only time I've ever used all 8 PCIe slots in a case :p


Man, 2011 seems like just yesterday.

H-combo.jpg

I just hope that whatever they do, they only put display and other connectors on the first slot or two, and that aftermarket brackets are offered, so those of us who take the cooler off and install a water block, can minimize the size of the things.


Edit:

Actually, I'm going to ahve to take part of this back. I DID have these same GPU's, case and cooler on my Phenom II build, but apparently I never took a picture of that. This is a later picture from after I upgraded the moterhboard and CPU to an x79 and i7-3930k. That beast hit 4.8Ghz with this cooler. (At least in the winter. I remember having to clock it down to 4.7 in the summer on this cooler)
 
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A lot of high end motherboards only ever come with two PCIe x16 slots and one or two other semi-useful ones if you are lucky. Given that SLI is dead, I don't really see this being a problem.

That is true,

as long as all the useful slots aren't all crowded immediately next to the primary x16 slot, in other words, underneath the monster cooler.
 
I should've taken pics back in the day when I had 2x970s in SLI and a 780 GTX on an X79 board in a HAF 932 case. Also had around 6+ HDD's (2 x RAIDs and misc). That got cramped but worked great for the time.

Yeah, these days one would have to have a pretty specific need for another PCIe 4.0 x16 slot since most motherboards already have dedicated M.2 ports. On the other hand, 4-slots can have an issue where the ports/air duct is on the card get covered by the chassis/case. I was a little concerned with the EVGA 3090 Ti I recently got because the air ducts ended up being partially covered by the grill of the case. It all worked out o.k. but I almost considered using some wire cutters to cut the grill off.
 
With AMD claiming another 50% performance per watt improvement on RDNA3, this coming generation may not look good for Nvidia.

TSMC 5nm is going to be crowded. Who will get the most wafers?
 
Why not just call them "All Your Slots" cards?

Seriously though... yeah with SLI dead and gone, not much else PCI-E wise in my slots. Well, my ancient Xi-Fi sound card I guess. But I'm not certain if I was building new if I would even bother to include a sound card anymore.
 
TSMC 5nm is going to be crowded. Who will get the most wafers?
Found this - crowded indeed. What is extremely interesting - they share that in 2022 TSMC expects a total 5nm capacity of approx 1M wafers/yr. You ~could~ then go off die size (multiple dies per wafer) and sales figures and some reasonable estimates of yields and get at the relative share of the pie for various players.


Betting Apple keeps their preference in there and gets whatever they want of that piece of the pie.

Intel is curious - Xe GPUs ~or~ FPGAs.... They could afford to buy a big chunk, but idk that they will - it would be in their best interest to get back on their own nodes asap. Barring that, their second best strategy is to buy up as much as they can to keep AMD, and to a lesser extent nVidia and Apple, production constrained.

My opinion: it looks like they are just giving themselves an avenue to do that - Xe obviously isn't going to be in large production numbers anytime soon, and probably not by the end of 2022 just looking at their history of delay and the recent announcements of sales strategy and channels... so they can just throw some FPGAs over there just to keep TSMC busy and push out their rivals.
 
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Of the chip players the only one thst could buy up fab space over the others is Apple. Unless Amazon is having their cpus made by tsmc as well.
 
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Of the chip players the only one thst could buy up fab space over the others is Intel. Unless Amazon is having their cpus made by tsmc as well.
Doesn't Apple have about a trillion dollars?
 
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