GPU For the love of blowers (or "Would it be Quieter to go with a Blower in a SFF?")

[TheInternal]

Howdy all.

So, I'm still bouncing around ideas / doing research on and off while I wait for my CPU to get in. One of the things I have noticed on the forum is an affinity for blower style cards. I "get it" that in small cases, having a card blow the heat exhaust out of the case makes sense if you have little case airflow or a lack of ventilation, but my limited experience with blowers (my two Geforce 280 GTX cards in SLI) has shown me they have AWFUL acoustic properties. Those things are louder at idle than my main system is at load, and by a significant margin.

Is it mostly a matter of sacrificing acoustic properties in the pursuit of maximizing efficient use of space? I've noticed a lot of SFF cases tend to not be conducive to utilizing air pressure for movement due to the proliferation of large vents / perforated cases designs. Doesn't all the ventilation reduce the amount of dead zones / allow for whatever style of GPU cooler to function well?

I've historically been okay with going a little hot (higher than preferred, but still within manufacturer listed thermal limits) on builds to keep acoustics down. My experiment with a traditional midtower (an Antec 180b) setup where the only active cooling was 3 or 4 120mm fans on low to mid settings in a push/pull config with nothing but giant passive heatsinks on the CPU and two 7950 GTs in SLI definately ran warm, but ran quiet and well.

Does the forum have many passive cooling aficionados?

 

[jeshikat]

I personally prefer non-blower cards and have my eye on a GTX 1070 Strix. I do have dual blower 980s that show up often in pics of Cerberus but that's because I'm running SLI in a small case plus I bought them on launch day and that was all that was available.

For a single card setup, I would almost always rather have a non-blower since I prefer low noise and don't mind high temps. Passive cooling isn't something I'm interested in though because I like powerful hardware in small cases and that isn't conducive to fanless cooling.

 

[EdZ]

Most blowers are pretty awful. Aftermarket blowers are now nonexistant, so you have to rely on the stock blower being any good.
On the Nvidia side, the NVTTM-style coolers on the GTX Titan onwards are actually rather good in terms of cooling and noise, as are a handful of 'OEM' blowers that are the same guts with a plastic shroud rather than magnesium. Unfortunately, most OEM coolers are garbage (e.g.). Nvidia also seem to no longer be willing to subsidise the cost of these coolers, so expect to pay a premium for them on the 1070/1080.
AMDs blower offerings are universally bad. AMD's problems are mostly due to the very high power of their past few generation of card, so that might change with their upcoming cards which are rumoured to be a lot more power efficient.

As to whether they will be quieter, an open cooler can use more and larger fans to keep the fan speed (and thus noise) down, but only when there is something to assist them in removing the hot exhaust air they dump inside the case. If you don't they can end up being louder than a blower cooler, due to them ingesting their own hot air and needing to ramp their fans up to higher speeds (and making more noise) to maintain cooling performance (example here).
For most large cases removing the hot exhaust will be done with chassis fans, which can be large (120mm/140mm or bigger) and slow, so pretty quiet. For SFF, you may not be able to fit big chassis fans in, so another option is ducting. This effectively needs to be customised to a specific cooler design and location, but allows an open cooler to be effectively be turned into a blower cooler by ducting fresh air in and hot air out. May be tricky to fabricate, and takes up some 'dead' space in the case.
The final option depends heavily on case design. If the case allows the GPU to sit immediately next to a vented side panel (as close to touching as possible) then it will be acting as it's own intake fan without giving the hot exhaust a chance to recirculate. Ducting may still be needed to prevent the hot GPU exhaust from being ingested by other components (e.g. CPU cooler) depending on whether the case design has chambers or not.

 

[Phuncz]

As to whether they will be quieter, an open cooler can use more and larger fans to keep the fan speed (and thus noise) down, but only when there is something to assist them in removing the hot exhaust air they dump inside the case. If you don't they can end up being louder than a blower cooler, due to them ingesting their own hot air and needing to ramp their fans up to higher speeds (and making more noise) to maintain cooling performance (example here).

The final option depends heavily on case design. If the case allows the GPU to sit immediately next to a vented side panel (as close to touching as possible) then it will be acting as it's own intake fan without giving the hot exhaust a chance to recirculate. Ducting may still be needed to prevent the hot GPU exhaust from being ingested by other components (e.g. CPU cooler) depending on whether the case design has chambers or not.

I agree with this sentiment. Blower-coolers are almost universally hated, because open-coolers perform better, outside a case. As soon as a GPU is inside a case, the amount of airflow (meaning intake and exhaust, not just one or the other) will determine how the cooler will keep behaving.

This is where a blower-cooler excels because it exhausts most of the hot air at the rear, minimally affecting internal case temperatures. But a open-cooler exhausts all the hot air inside the case. So you need to design around this issue by using either ducting or airflow, as @EdZ already said. The only blower-cooler I'd ever consider is the Nvidia that is used on the GTX 980 and 1080. It's rumored that the 1070 might have a slightly less performing one.

I have a custom open-cooler (Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV) with two casefans instead of the three standard ones. This allows me to rotate the fans so they act as an exhaust and immediately exfiltrate the hot air outside the case, before it gets a chance to heat up my components. This way I can have airfow and keep my components cool, while I'm running a 275W TDP GPU. In this I used the concept of properly balanced airflow and ducting on a open-cooler to reach a point that I can't see it becoming any cooler without it becoming louder.

So in my case, fresh air comes in from the sidepanel up top and exits on the bottom of the case. In the process this also cools my CPU which only adds a little heat for the GPU to take care of.

 

[EdZ]

It's rumored that the 1070 might have a slightly less performing one.

While the shroud design changed for the 1070/1080, and the shroud internals vary slightly with each generation to accommodate minor difference (e.g. the DVI header size on the 9xx series) internally there are two variants of the NVTTM cooler:
GTX Titan, GTX Titan Black, GTX 780, GTX 980Ti, GTX Titan X, GTX 1080 - These all use a vapour chamber between the die and the heatsink
GTX 770, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 1070 - These use a triple-heatpipe design between the die and the heatsink
The fan itself, the VRM heatsink, the internal air channel plate, etc are effectively the same for all these coolers.

 

[specfreq]

I've had my eye on the Silverstone Sugo SG13 and I was wondering this myself.

I came across this review of the case in which they used an open air cooler

The the solid front SG13B-Q (be quiet?) raised CPU temps by 6c under load but had no affect on GPU temps, and therefore no fan speed/noise increase. I'm guessing a louder, blower style, GPU will also have little impact on CPU temps and noise.

Edit: This thread is full of discussion on blower vs openair