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Asus might be sticking 24 carat gold into its mice to celebrate its 20th anniversary and Gigabyte is slapping satellite-grade metals onto its motherboards for its own anniversary, but it's a diamond anniversary for MSI as it's jamming smooshed up diamonds into its next-gen GPU cooling solutions.
The next-gen graphics card cooler MSI had on-show at Computex today is a concept design for what the cards of tomorrow (or rather 2027 at the earliest) could look like. The new cooling feature set is estimated to cut maybe four degrees centigrade off the peak temperatures of a high-end GPU, but every little counts.
Those new features in short:
- Full metal fan blades
- Rifled heat pipes
- Diamond-composite thermal pads
- Diamond-copper composite contact plate
Switching from the plastic fan blades of its existing coolers means saying goodbye to potential warping of the blades at high speeds, allowing for a more rigid structure, which should reportedly increasing cooling efficiency.
And they feel really cool to the touch, too, though I wouldn't want to get a finger caught in one of them.
Maybe more interesting is the rifled barrels of the heatpipes MSI is using on this new design. Inside the pipes there is a spiral structure which increases the contact area inside them, allowing for greater thermal transfer as opposed to the regular design.
Then we come to the diamonds. Mixed inside both the heatpads sitting atop the expensive memory modules and the base plate of the cooling array itself, is a diamond powder designed to increase the thermal conductivity within both components. In the baseplate it's a diamond-copper composite and you can see in the images that it looks kinda dirty by comparison with the standard all-copper version. But it also sometimes sparkles in the light. And cools a bit better, apparently.
Now, as I said, these new features will only drop the temps by an approximate four degrees, but you've got to think that switching in more expensive materials and introducing more intricate manufacturing is only going to do one thing to the manufacturing price of associated cooling shrouds, and therefore to the price of the associate cards.
But this is a concept design in lieu of actual new GPUs to drool over, so while that RTX 5090 there does look pretty, you're not going to be able to buy one even if you did have the cash. Best just wait for the RTX 6090, eh?
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Nvidia RTX 5050
4. Best mid-range: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
