PCs, components and devices giant Asus has launched a new GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card design. The new Asus Turbo GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6 is designed in a twin slot blower style form factor. It is immediately explained that this might be a good choice for a PC chassis with limited space and restricted airflow that an exhaust cooler will traditionally be a good fit for.
Asus hasn’t just grabbed an off the shelf blower design, one very similar to blower style cards from previous generations. It has implemented a fan shroud bevel or edge design that is claimed to help maximise airflow within the constraints of a 2-slot blower form. You can see this sloping or trailing off edge clearly in some of the views of the design I have embedded in the article.
Asus is providing the Turbo-RTX3070-8G with dual mode BIOS, the gaming mode matches reference clocks with a 1725MHz GPU boost speed. There is an OC mode which is marginally faster at 1755MHz, for what that is worth. If I owned this I wouldn’t want to push it hard with its single 80mm fan.
This is by no means the only blower style RTX 30 card launched by Nvidia partners. Other recent introductions include the Asus Turbo GeForce RTX 3090, which looks a lot like this example, and the recently announced MSI GeForce RTX 2090 Aero 24G.
In a chassis with ample internal space and airflow you might be better off with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 reference design which utilises a similar shroud/cooling method to its beefier reference siblings. Alternatively, there are lots of partner designs with two or three large cooling fans fitted to calm the GPU, VRAM and VRMs.