PNY introduces GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with a blower fan

GDM discovered a new GeForce RTX 4070 GPU at PNY Computex booth.

One might have thought that blower fans are a thing of a past, but we are progressively seeing more and more of such designs popping out recently. NVIDIA and their board partners realized that there is still a market for such designs while GPU sales right now aren't great. It seems like a missed chance to not launch any of these designs.

PNY RTX 4070 Blower Edition, Source: GDM

PNY RTX 4070 is the first blower-style design from this company based on Ada architecture. Of course, that's only including the gaming GeForce series because PNY also makes workstation cards, but this may actually explain how this RTX 4070 card came to live, they simply reused one of their coolers.

This design is actually quite efficient, and it only generates about 32 dBA noise according to PNY representative, which is just about as loud as any design with axial fans. However, one must remember that RTX 4070 is a 200W GPU, which is not exactly a high power requirement.

PNY RTX 4070 Blower Edition, Source: GDM

NVIDIA was actively trying to prevent such designs from happening, and we have seen a fruit of this work with RTX 3090 around two years ago. Many of blower-style models suddenly disappeared as soon as NVIDIA realized that such card could compete with their workstation series, despite missing some basic software functionality. This may also explain why we are seeing RTX 4070 but not 4080 or 4090, although such cards did appear as renders before.

PNY RTX 4070 Blower Edition, Source: GDM

The blower-style designs are useful for researchers who require heavy compute efficiency on a budget. Such graphics cards are often used in clusters, hence a blower-type fan with a dual-slot design is much easier to fit into such systems.

Source: GDM