GPU Blower card required?

[ZedMurphy]

Hey all,

I have a Modivio xCaseL turning up within the next couple of days and it's time to start ordering some parts. Its mainly an emulation machine so needs a CPU with high single thread performance, and the best bang for buck I can find in the UK is the i5-9400F https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html. The question is without onboard graphics, I need a reasonable graphics card to match. Modivio recommend using a blower card to try and control temps, but I simply can't find any modern cards that are blowers.

So two questions:
1) Would it be silly of me to try and run an open-air fan cooled card?
2) Does anyone have any recommendations for blower cards at c.£200 level?

I appreciate any help that you can give.

Cheers!

 

[W4RR10R]

Looking at the product page, they do suggest a couple cards that aren't blower, and looking at the case I see no reason that a non blower wouldn't work, other than a blower helping exhaust this case a bit, but the 60mm fans that aren't included. If that £200 (~$260) is a hard limit the GTX 1660 is the way to go but you can stretch to $280 (~£213) the GTX 1660ti would be more than enough for emulation.

 

[Valantar]

It's likely that 1660/- Ti cards with blower coolers will start showing up as budget options down the line, but they'll likely take a little while as higher-end options are usually out first. Asus maintains its Turbo lineup quite consistently, with even a full stack of RTX cards, so I'm guessing an Asus GTX 1660 Turbo will arrive when they see high-end sales dip enough.

 

[ZedMurphy]

Thank you both for your input. I'm looking to build this within the next couple of weeks, so I probably have to make do with what's currently on the market. In the UK the 1660's are £200 and the ti versions are c.£250. So here's one last question which may get to the nub of the issue. If pushing to £250, which I could do, would it make more sense to get a low end fan cooled 1660ti or a vega 56 blower? The msi airboost vega 56 is on for about the same price as the msi ventus 1660ti, and whilst the 1660ti has slightly better performance, the vega is a blower...

Which would be better for temps (and by that I really mean controlled fan noise) in a small case?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...r-boost-video-card-rx-vega-56-air-boost-8g-oc

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...tus-xs-video-card-gtx-1660-ti-ventus-xs-6g-oc

 

[Valantar]

Considering that the Vega consumes nearly double the power of the 1660 Ti, I would be wiling to bet it would be both louder and hotter (disclaimer: I'm quite an ardent proponent of AMD, and I've never owned an Nvidia card personally, so there's definitely no bias here). The lower power draw and better cooling axial fans of the 1660 Ti should more than make up for the case airflow disadvantage against a blower card when the power difference is that substantial.

 

[W4RR10R]

Vega, is potentially a good option, it is actually slightly better than a 1660ti (may vary by use case) and absolutely demolishes the 1660 which still uses GDDR5. It does use power stated TDP ~210W and the 1660 ti has a TDP of ~130W.