You remember that quad-slot Nvidia graphics card cooler, right? Well, it’s back in the news as fresh images of the design show that at least part of the reason it was so enormous was because it had a fan hidden inside the heatsink.
The cooler appears to be a prototype design that Nvidia was working on but has either ditched or still hasn’t used in a released product. It was originally rumored to be for the RTX 4090 Ti but recent rumors suggest the RTX 4090 Ti is cancelled anyway. It could also have been tested for use with the RTX 4090 or some future RTX 5090, but all we do know is it hasn’t yet seen the light of day.
One of the possible reasons why this design hasn’t yet been used is what has been revealed in these recently-leaked images, as they show this quad-slot Nvidia cooler has a fan inside the heatsink. This extra slim fan sits right in the middle of the cooling fins where it pulls and pushes air through the heatsink. This placement not only seems slightly unnecessary from a cooling efficiency point of view but would also make servicing and cleaning a pain due to the fan being hidden inside.
Also revealed in these latest images is the aluminum X-piece that is the signature of Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards removed from the design, seemingly confirming this was a true Nvidia design, not a third-party cooler. With this piece out the way you can also see the cabling for the fans and lighting that runs underneath.
The images come for Goofish user Hayaka who describes it as being for a possible ‘RTX4090es/RTX4090ti/RTX Titan’. Other images they shared show the base of the cooler (the shiny metal section in the image above), again highlighting how the design would seem to require the cooler to sit on top of a special horizontal graphics card design, rather than sitting on the side of a conventional vertical graphics card design.
It’s this latter aspect of the cooler’s design that is perhaps most interesting and makes us really want to see a card that would be compatible with it. Would it only work with PCIe exertion cables and separate graphics card mounts or could you really have a graphics card sit horizontally to your motherboard?
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