Fanless graphics cards are not commonly seen these days as most GPUs tend to get very hot and require an active cooler with two or three fans. Even in the relatively energy efficient mainstream. But an aficionado took matters into his own hands and built a passively cooled graphics board with the latest GPUs powered by Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, but the cooling is his 15-year-old Arctic done in the cooler.they shared their experiences in SFF.Network.
RevocCases used Nvidia’s professional-grade RTX A2000 graphics based on the GA106 GPU with 3,328 CUDA cores (up to 1.20 GHz) and a 192-bit memory interface to build a passively cooled graphics card. adopted the card. The card comes with 6GB of memory and has a power rating of 70W. This means you don’t need an auxiliary PCIe power connector. Of course, 70W isn’t a lot, so you could use a suitable cooler to cool the board passively.
That “proper” cooler is Arctic’s Accelero S1 Rev. 2, designed for AMD’s Radeon HD 3850/3870 and Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT/8800 GTS in 2008-2009. You can purchase this product from experts such as: cooler guys Or from Ebay, it’s not that expensive. The passive cooler appears to be compatible with Nvidia’s RTX A2000 graphics cards, but modders decided to attach a copper plate to the cooler to cool the GDDR6 memory as well.
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Nvidia’s GeForce RTX A2000 graphics card is designed for compact workstations, so it doesn’t come cheap.can be obtained for $356 at Amazon (opens in new tab)However, it is possible to get it cheaply on Ebay.
Note that Nvidia’s RTX A2000 board offers similar performance to the GeForce RTX 3060. This is not at all what demanding gamers want. Meanwhile, Nvidia recently launched his RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation board, which offers GeForce RTX 3070 (one of the best graphics cards) level performance and comes with 24GB of memory. The RTX 4000 SFF draws only 70W of power and can be passively cooled, but with an MSRP of $1,250, it’s not cheap.
Unfortunately, building a modern passively cooled graphics card requires either a professional board or downclocking a consumer board. However, while it is technically possible to underclock the GPU and memory, compatibility with the Accelero S1 Rev. 2 cooling system is not guaranteed as graphics cards are designed for different coolers. That said, professional graphics cards for compact workstations seem like a viable option for building a fanless graphics card.
