New list by Korea National Radio Research Institute confirm An Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card with blower cooling could be in the works by GPU maker Leadtek. The intended role of this GPU is professional use with a focus on AI-intensive workloads, not gaming.
We know basically nothing about this new GPU. All we know is the model name “RTX 4070 AI BLOWER” on the list and the manufacturer (Leadtek). But even with this limited information, it’s clear that this card is specifically designed for the server/workstation market and not for gamers. If it goes on sale, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP.
Ever since Nvidia transitioned the cooler design of its Founders Edition cards from a vapor chamber blower-style cooler to a standard dual-fan cooler starting with the RTX 20 series, blower-style coolers have become very rare in the consumer space. Since then, NVIDIA has become very opposed to AIB partners using blower-style coolers for the company’s mainstream his GeForce-branded gaming graphics cards.
One reason Nvidia has changed its stance on blower-style coolers is likely to prevent competition between consumer GeForce GPUs and professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards. Nvidia’s professional GPUs are built almost entirely with blower-style coolers to squeeze as many GPUs as possible into a single workstation/server chassis. The problem is that Nvidia’s Quadro and A-series GPUs are significantly more expensive than their GeForce counterparts. That means his high-performance GeForce card with blower-style cooling would benefit far less than a professional-grade GPU.
Nvidia has banned AIB partners from manufacturing RTX 3090 blower style cards in 2021. At the time, several partners had blower-style RTX 3090 cards on the market, many of which were used by system builders such as Puget Systems. Build a multi-GPU RTX 3090 workstation. Unfortunately, Nvidia learned of this workaround and decided to ban this practice entirely. However, the company did not ban his RTX 3080 or RTX 3070 blower style cards, only the RTX 3090 version.
The weird thing about this story is that Nvidia never Formally As far as we know, high-end blower-style coolers were banned after that. We saw an RTX 4090 Blower style card a few months back and it looked like a pre-production sample that was basically production ready. However, we have never seen a blower-style RTX 40-series GPU of his hit the mainstream market before. So no one knows what happened.
With an RTX 4070 blower-style card potentially hitting the market, the question arises: Why are Nvidia’s partners risking their R&D budgets for a product that will almost certainly be banned by Nvidia? increase. We don’t know the answer, but perhaps some of these manufacturers have gone ahead with designing prototypes, and one day he hopes Nvidia will give the green light to production. Nvidia has technically only banned his RTX xx90 blower-style GPUs, not lower cards, so this is more likely the case for his RTX 4070.
