hey everybody Gordon with PCWorld I am here with our GPU expert Brad
charkas and we are gonna settle the question everybody wants to know
axial versus blower which is better there's only one answer Brad neither is
better they both have very specific use cases one is better than the other for
the vast majority of people though so blower cider coolers they come reference
cards up until the current single fan right single fans fan in their truck
there's a single fan in the shroud it sucks the air in and shoots out the back
of your PC right through the where all the ports are on the graphics card axial
fans usually dual axial triaxial of two or three fans their fans said to
brighten the shroud and what they do is they take all the heat from your
graphics chip and dump it back into your case and then the case fans blow all the
high air out like they do all the normal hot air so blower style fans they're
popular reference reference cards because you know typically like
companies like AMD want to give their board partners room to operate it's very
useful because it avoids dumping hot air back into your system so blower style
fans can be useful if you're running multiple GPUs for whatever reason if
you've got three or four graphics cards in your system a blower style cooler
gets all that hot air on the back your system rather than the one on the top
dumping on the one on the bottom that wouldn't up in on the one that etc
but they tend to run a lot hotter and they tend to run a lot louder so that's
the beginning of time now earlier you said that companies like AMD Nvidia they
like to let their partners operate what does that mean exactly well whenever you
buy a graphics card you're typically not buying it right from AMD or Nvidia they
they make the GPUs and then they gave the GPUs to their board partners like a
soos and EVGA and MSI and those companies make the graphics cards that
you buy and they frequently try to one-up each other give you more value by
putting custom fan designs on their custom coolers big beefy heat sinks RGB
lighting overclocked stuff like that and that's where these blower sell designs
or not blower axial style design typically come in they're all trying to
make the best coolers that they can so they tend to run a lot cooler which in
turn lets you get more of an overclock which modern-day GPUs are very sensitive
to thermals and power demands so if you can have a cooler cooler then you can
potentially get more performance out of your graphics cards as well so that's a
big benefit of axial signs okay so what what situations because I mean the
popular opinion that blower fan shouldn't even exist you disagree with
that so what are the situations you should be running a blower fan versus a
dual axial so the multi-gpu as mentioned earlier that's definite consideration
and also if you're in a small form-factor PC there's not a lot of room
in those and a lot of them don't have great ventilation to begin with so if
you have a small form-factor PC like the silverstone makes a nice one then if you
could get a blower style cooler it just blows it all at the back for you so it
just makes life a lot easier those are really the only two scenarios
where I would want a blower style fan okay they're Radeon rx 5700 series just
came out for the first month or so they were only available in blower style
designs reference Burton's just came out I reviewed the sapphire pulse which is
only about ten dollars more switching to an axial design you know putting a beep
here he'd take on it it runs so much quieter and cooler it's I mean you can
get a cheap custom design for not much more than a reference card so most most
people with this system with proper air cooling air flow that's they don't they
should not consider a blower fan at all no okay hmm it's specialized so it
sounds like you're saying they they should exist but they should only exist
for a few people that's correct okay all right well I'm glad I know that now and
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