Look, the Laurel and Hardy of Nvidia graphics card coolers

There have been a couple of reveals today showing off designs for a pair of Nvidia Ada Lovelace graphics cards from two different ends of the RTX 40-series spectrum. At one end the Chiphell forum has gotten hold of some shots of the unfeasibly massive cooling array that was apparently specced out for the 900W variant of Nvidia's top GPU silicon, and at the other we have some renders of the RTX 4070.

And they honestly couldn't be more different. 

If we start with the most recognisable, we have the RTX 4070 shroud presented by YouTuber, Moore's Law is Dead. In order to protect their sources they had a render made from actual photographs of the card's cooler, and it's claimed, "the thing looks 99% like the real thing."

We're back to a dual-slot design for the RTX 4070, which is a blessed relief coming off the back of the frankly vast RTX 4090 cooler. That chonky boi is apparently also going to be used for the RTX 4080 16GB Founders Edition, too. According to the leak, the RTX 4070 is effectively going to be a slightly smaller variant of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition design.

They also report that, according to their sources, there's been no hint of any kind of cooling issues keeping the RTX 4070 chilled under that shroud. And you'd hope that to be the case given that if we are looking at a cut-down version of the AD104 GPU that was going to be used for the erstwhile RTX 4080 12GB, that's one comparatively smol graphics die.

In fact, at 295mm² it's only slightly bigger than the GA106 chip Nvidia used to power the RTX 3050 of the previous generation. 

When's the RTX 4070 going to arrive? Ah… no idea. Given the RTX 4080 16GB is coming on November 16 the likelihood of getting our hands on a more mainstream GPU this side of the new year is pretty low. As is the card coming with anything like a sensible price tag.

What definitely wouldn't have come with a sensible price tag is the Titan RTX Ada Lovelace card that may once have existed. Reports are that any Titan card in this generation has been cancelled, as the MLID channel claims it was "melting power supplies, and sometimes melting itself lol."

But the 900W-capable cooler design has been shown via a post on Chiphell which exposes the monstrous size of the chip chiller. There were claims the people working on the potential card in the labs they mounted the motherboard to the side of the card instead of the other way around.

And from the images shown online, you can see why. It looks a lot like the massive vapor chamber cooling array actually mounted vertically on top of the PCB and GPU rather than horizontally. If you see where the actual mounting plates for the GPU and VRM are, they appear to be positioned on what is traditionally the edge of a graphics card cooler. 

I'm glad we work with an open test bench here for our component benchmarking, because I wouldn't have wanted to try and squeeze that thing into an actual chassis. But hey, it's seemingly been cancelled so we don't have to worry about that.

On to the RTX 4080 16GB, which will be plenty big enough, I'm sure.