Nvidia’s unreleased quad-slot cooler has been posted on Goofish by Hayaka with a detailed view of all its components, including a hidden third fan and the board’s power delivery. Colour us intrigued.
Rumoured to be cooling an RTX 4090 Ti / RTX Titan graphics card, this massive chunk of metal takes four slots, designed to sit vertically on top of the PCB. Based on previous pics’ limited viewing angles, it was assumed the heatsink was coupled with two fans in a push-pull configuration, similar to Nvidia’s current RTX 4080 Founders Edition. Turns out, there is a third fan hidden inside the fin stack.
The heatsink is suffused by a massive number of heatpipes, as Hayaka counts no fewer than 22 terminations, indicating that, logically, there are 11 actual heatpipes, based on two terminations per pipe – similar to what is done on CPU tower coolers. This fin / pipe combo sits on a vapour-chamber block that contacts the GPU, helping further with heat dispersion.
But that’s not all. Due to this unusual PCB position, power is routed around the cooler using two thick copper wires – probably one for ground and one for 12V – alongside the four sense pins that enable the PSU to deliver the correct amount of current. And by the way, a card based on this cooler would have been limited to 675W; there is only a single 12VHPWR connection.
Aside from the massive size, we can clearly see the amount of work required to build each cooler, which may have been the reason Nvidia scrapped the design in place of its current Founders Edition model. Bet cleaning one of these is no fun.
This cooler may never see the light of day, as according to @kopite7kimi, Nvidia is no longer pursuing an RTX 4090 Ti model. Nevertheless, we would have liked to see how capable one of these could have been.
