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Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
derekullo I'd always assumed blowers were the most efficient / loudest way to cool down a chip using air. Especially if you had a way to vent the hot air directly outside Reply
hotaru251 derekullo said: I'd always assumed blowers were the most efficient / loudest way to cool down a chip using air. Especially if you had a way to vent the hot air directly outside in confined spaces i believe so (so server racks) but in actual pc cases and places w/ room to breathe multi fan were better especially as they started to improve the actual cooling from die to heatsink/pipes. I just recall hearing somewhere that Nvidia actually stopped allowing 3rd party vendors from making blower style as they wanted to keep the cheaper gaming cards from being used in servers (which they sold at a much more costly product) Reply
jlake3 I used to always run blower coolers because the airflow path made more sense to me (and I needed to put expansion cards in nearby slots), and I feel like the "hairdryer" derision was blown way out of proportion. At 300 watts they can be screaming to keep up… but most cards back then weren't 300 watts. At lower power they were fine, especially ones that used vapor chambers to spread the heat out to the fin stack, although heatpipe designs weren't bad either. I'm not exactly sure what the wattage was, but there was a certain point where you could get way with a cheap extruded aluminum open-air cooler but not the same cheap fins in a blower, which created a marketing incentive to push more 2-fan coolers and ship less blowers at the low end. At the high-end and even midrange, cards started pushing higher TDPs after the GTX 10-series, and cards didn't just need to switch from blower to open-air but also got taller and thicker and longer. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidias-blackwell-gaming-gpus-go-through-blower-style-transformation-to-fuel-ai-data-centers-rtx-5080-rtx-5070-ti-rtx-5060-ti-blower-gpus-up-for-purchase-in-china#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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- Intel Panther Lake press Q&A transcript — EVO is still alive, and the company ditches prior-generation naming scheme
- CES 2026 Day 2: Dell’s massive 52-inch 6K monitor, AMD unbothered by Intel’s new Arc B390 IGP, MSI PSUs guard against RTX 5090 meltdowns
- AMD is unfazed by Panther Lake's big integrated GPU — 'It's not even a fair fight' to compare the Arc B390 to Strix Halo, AMD exec claims
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