Scott Herkelman, AMD’s Vice President and General Manager of the Radeon Business Unit, has confirmed on Reddit in a PSA that third-party Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards with custom coolers will be available in mid-August.
Herkelman defended the choice of the blower cooler for the launch builds, saying: ‘Love it or hate it, the blower allowed us to guarantee performance in every system to match our launch charts.’
It’s a fair approach if you’re purely looking to sell a card based on its speed, although we tested the Navi cards with blower coolers and they made a nasty racket. The good news is that a second wave of cards sporting new, and hopefully better, cooling options might give the series a soft relaunch.
Later in his post, Herkelman also referred to his desire to continue ‘jebaiting’ Nvidia, a reference to a tweet of his when there were rumours of a pre-launch Navi price drop. Investigations continue, but we still have no clue what ‘jebaiting’ means.