Re: [Request for Info]Efficient airflow design for GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce GTX 1080Ti
These cards are amazing at cooling but they're not designed to have airflow going parallel to them:
These cards want air from where you would normally put another GPU in case of mining and as you can see the direction of the heatsink blades and the plastic cover, pushing air to them lengthwise from either direction is pointless.
In a typical gaming computer with one card there's plenty of space to pull air from.
Let's look at this typical 4U server case setup sketch:
Orange = GPU
Green = air direction the cards are desidned
Red = case fan air direction
As you can see if anything, the case fans might even work against the GPU fans. And the output of the hot air on the top and bottom is also blocked in a closed case which makes it even worse.
And they're also very wide cards (5,5 cm) so in a typical 445cm 4U case there will be only 1,43cm between cards and the walls in case of 6 cards. And that 1,43cm is where they're trying to pull air from.
I have a couple of these cards in an open rig with about 6-8cm in beween them and they're the coolest. I'm also trying to move away from open cases to server cases because of dust but I'll be leaving these cards in open frame rigs because these cards - unlike its predecessors - have double ball bearing fans so dust is not as much of an issue. If you dedust them frequently of course with an air compressor. I have Gigabyte GTX 1070s with already replaced fans because they're so poor quality even low quantites of dust kills thems, meanwhile I still have 970s of the same design with more or less working fans.
These cards want air from where you would normally put another GPU in case of mining and as you can see the direction of the heatsink blades and the plastic cover, pushing air to them lengthwise from either direction is pointless.
In a typical gaming computer with one card there's plenty of space to pull air from.
Let's look at this typical 4U server case setup sketch:
Orange = GPU
Green = air direction the cards are desidned
Red = case fan air direction
As you can see if anything, the case fans might even work against the GPU fans. And the output of the hot air on the top and bottom is also blocked in a closed case which makes it even worse.
And they're also very wide cards (5,5 cm) so in a typical 445cm 4U case there will be only 1,43cm between cards and the walls in case of 6 cards. And that 1,43cm is where they're trying to pull air from.
I have a couple of these cards in an open rig with about 6-8cm in beween them and they're the coolest. I'm also trying to move away from open cases to server cases because of dust but I'll be leaving these cards in open frame rigs because these cards - unlike its predecessors - have double ball bearing fans so dust is not as much of an issue. If you dedust them frequently of course with an air compressor. I have Gigabyte GTX 1070s with already replaced fans because they're so poor quality even low quantites of dust kills thems, meanwhile I still have 970s of the same design with more or less working fans.