RTX 3000 series blower style cards quietly disappeared several months ago. Galax is bringing them back but only for the Chinese market in the form of a RTX 3080 and 3090. Videocardz has posted a comparison article looking at the previous Galax models and found there are some minor changes to the PCB design.
Here is a link to the Videocardz article.
Blower cards have gotten a bad reputation due to their poor performance in comparison to large axial cooler fans. A recent example of this would be the Radeon 5700XT series which suffered from high temperatures and loud operation. While this earned the blower card a bad reputation in the minds of many recent card buyers, Gamers Nexus discovered that the blower fan itself wasn’t the entire issue as there was a lack of mounting pressure that they resolved with small washers. This substantially reduced noise and improved cooling capability.
In the Small Form Factor space, blower cards are still quite useful as they exhaust their heat outside the case. This can substantially help temperatures of surrounding components. Additionally, blower cards provide better cooling when in tight quarters such as multi-gpu systems 0r space constrained SFF cases, and rarely exceed a 2-slot design.
