Why does AMD & Nvidia Make Reference Cards

[Stephie_Girl]

Water cooling and for cases with poor airflow.

[stan92]

@Stephie_Girl do you mean the partners such as (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte Powercolor etc) make aftermarket coolers so people can water cool the gpu's and for people with bad airflowed cases?

[Stephie_Girl]

@Stephie_Girl do you mean the partners such as (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte Powercolor etc) make aftermarket coolers so people can water cool the gpu's and for people with bad airflowed cases?

Reference designs (blower style coolers) actually perform better in poorly ventilated cases.  They also use reference PCB's and are cheaper so people often use them for water cooling.

[stan92]

how do they perform better in poorly ventilated cases? and why would they use reference PCB's for water cooling?

[madscientist56]

I'd say its for all the other companys to build off of and improve from. Ive seen lots of company just take a refrence card pull off the cooler and put on their own then sell it, and it works for them and id buy it.

 

Also,  ----What about the Titan cooler !----    you described refrence coolers as hot and clunky and I agree for most cards, but the Titan cooler is anything but that. In my opinion it looks pretty good its fairly cool and well built plus lots of people use it. I know it is kind of an exception because its their best card but just putting that out there.

[Glenwing]

Centrifugal fans blow air to the sides of the fan.  So they are placed on one end of the heatsink and they blow air through the heatsink and out the other end:

 

These fans have to spin pretty fast to push much air, so they are typically noisier than axial fans, but the way they blow the air means that it exhausts out the back of the case.

 

Meanwhile, axial fans blow air down into the heatsink, and it hits the bottom and disperses in all directions, taking the heat with it.  These fans can push a much higher volume of air than centrifugal fans at much quieter volumes, and you can have more than one, further increasing airflow and decreasing noise (because with more than one fan, you can have them spin at slower speeds and still get a lot of air flowing).  You can usually fit more heatsink into these cards as well since the fans sit on top of the heatsink, while blower fans are as tall as the whole card to maximize airflow from them as much as possible, so they take up space on the card that could otherwise be heatsink fins.  However these custom cooler designs usually exaust the hot air back into the case, so it's not good if you have 3 or 4 graphics cards in a system, or a system that has a lot of heat and not a lot of exhaust case fans.

 

[stan92]

@Glenwing Thankyou for that perfect answer

[stan92]

And thankyou everyone else

[Exotath]

NV's reference cooler is so sexy, and performs quite well too for something out of the box.

[stan92]

@ ??? NV ??? please post a pic for me and tell me what that is/means?

[Exotath]

nvidia, and glenwing posted a picture in his post.

[stan92]

ok thankyou everyone