Just yesterday Alienware announced its new machines, among which the Aurora R11 gaming desktop that comes with liquid cooling. We hadn't noticed at the time, but as tweeted by Asetek, it looks like the GPU will be liquid-cooled with a radiator built into a PCI-Express slot below the graphics card, which Asetek is calling the Rad Card.
We've seen some creative solutions to build GPUs into AIO loops, but this is something we haven't seen before, and is certainly even more unusual than what AMD did with its Radeon R9 Fury X.
According to Asetek, this setup reduces noise by 69% and temperatures by 20%. In the tweet thread, Asetek also explained that the Rad Card draws its power and fan curves from the GPU, which makes it extremely easy to operate.
However, Asetek made the decision to use blower-style coolers. For the graphics card itself, we can understand as after cooling the GPU externally, the blower doesn't need to do much work to keep the memory and VRMs cool. However, for the GPU, we would imagine that the blower on the Rad Card would still have to do quite a bit of work to dissipate the heat. Of course, the Alienware Aurora R11's chassis doesn't lend itself to huge amounts of airflow, so this might be the only way to effectively extract the heat buildup from the case.
That being said, the finish looks quite nice, and all the fan cables are integrated neatly into the sleeves of the liquid cooling hoses, creating a very clean appearance.
For the time being, Asetek is only providing the Rad Card solution to Alienware, which is currently only using the solution for an RTX 2080 Super, but did mention that it is always listening to the community. So, do you think this should become something available freely on the DIY market?