Stefan Mileschin

For those not sold on the looks and cooling performance of NVIDIA's reference design for the GeForce GTX Titan, GIGABYTE could have an alternative. The company is working on a new high-performance air graphics card cooler, which it could deploy on upcoming high-end graphics cards. Named WindForce 450W, the cooler is designed to handle thermal loads as high as 450W. GIGABYTE strapped it on to the GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 680, to show it off, at its "New Idea Tech Tour" event held in Berlin.

WindForce 450W is a triple-slot graphics card cooler. It uses a pair of dense aluminum fin stacks to dissipate heat. Three thick (10 mm thick?) copper heat pipes convey heat to these stacks, which is drawn directly from the GPU die. The two stacks are ventilated by three 80 mm fans. When strapped to a GeForce GTX 680, GIGABYTE claims the cooler keeps its noise below 28.3 dB, with Furmark running. On the GTX Titan, it works to provide higher GPU Boost frequencies, or helps sustain set frequency offsets better. With NVIDIA clamping down restrictions on modifying reference design GeForce GTX TITAN (with exceptions for liquid-based custom cooling solutions), we won't see a card that combines the chip with WindForce 450W any time soon.


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