Author: Michael Crider / Source: How-To Geek
If you’re shopping for a new graphics card for your desktop, you might have seen different models with different descriptions on the cooler units attached to the card—like “blower” or “open-air” cooler. Let’s take a look at what those terms mean for your GPU.
Both devices accomplish the same task: moving heat away from the central processor on the graphics card using a heatsink and a fan. This is a fundamental principle used in almost all desktop CPUs and most laptops: spread the heat from the processor out across a big brass or aluminum surface area and then move some cool air around it to get rid of the heat. The fans on your PC case itself do the same thing. The intake fans bring cool air in, and the outtake fans expel the hot air that’s been warmed by your computer’s various parts.
For a GPU, the difference comes in how those fans on your graphics card get rid of that excess heat. Both kinds use one or more fans on the cooling unit, mounted on the external plastic casing and drawing power from the card itself. These fans take in the hot air from the inside of your PC case. They don’t expel air out into it—at least not immediately.
An open-air GPU cooler takes in air from the fan, spreads that hot air over the heatsink, and then expels the warmed air back out into the interior of the case through openings on the top and bottom of the graphics card.
That’s why it’s called “open air,” because there’s nothing between the heatsink connected to the GPU’s graphics processor and the air inside the case. The airflow looks something like this, with blue arrows representing the cool air brought into the graphics card by the fan and red arrows representing hot air expelled past the heatsink back into the interior of the…The post What’s the Difference Between a Blower and an Open-Air GPU Cooler? appeared first on FeedBox.