Nvidia Be Damned, RTX 4070 is Getting Illicit Blower-Style Cooler Treatment

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Blower-style Leadtek RTX 4070 listing surfaces, Nvidia may not be happy

Leadtek GeForce RTX 3050 Classic
Image does not represent Leadtek's RTX 4070 blower-style card (Image credit: Leadtek)

A new listing from the National Radio Research Agency in Korea confirms that an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card with blower-style cooling might be in the works by GPU manufacturer Leadtek. The intended role of this GPU would be professional use — not gaming — with a focus on AI-intensive workloads. 

We know basically nothing about this new GPU — all we know is the model name from the listing, which reads "RTX 4070 AI BLOWER," as well as the manufacturer (Leadtek). But even with this limited information, it's clear this card is not aimed at gamers, but is designed specifically for the server/workstation market. If it comes out, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP. 

Blower-style coolers have become exceedingly rare in the consumer space since Nvidia shifted the cooler designs for its Founders Edition cards from vapor chamber blower-style coolers to standard dual-fan coolers, starting with the RTX 20 series. Since then, Nvidia has become incredibly opposed to AIB partners using blower-style coolers in the brand's mainstream GeForce-branded gaming graphics cards. 

We suspect one reason Nvidia changed its position on blower-style coolers is to prevent competition between its consumer GeForce GPUs and its professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards. Nvidia's professional GPUs are built almost entirely with blower-style coolers in order to squeeze as many GPUs as possible into a single workstation/server chassis. The problem is that Nvidia's Quadro and A-series GPUs are much more expensive than their GeForce counterparts, meaning any high-performing GeForce card with blower-style cooling would bring in far less profit than a professional GPU. 

Gigabyte RTX 3090 Turbo Blower-Style GPU (Image credit: Puget Systems)

Nvidia banned AIB partners from making RTX 3090 blower-style cards back in 2021. At the time, several partners had blower-style RTX 3090 cards on the market, and many of them were being used by system builders, such as Puget Systems, to build multi-GPU RTX 3090 workstations. Unfortunately Nvidia caught wind of the workaround and decided to ban the practice altogether — though the company didn't ban RTX 3080 or RTX 3070 blower-style cards, just the RTX 3090 versions.

The strange part of this story is that Nvidia never officially banned high-end blower-style coolers after that, from what we can tell. We saw an RTX 4090 blower-style card several months ago, which looked like a pre-production sample that was basically production-ready. But we have not seen any blower-style RTX 40 series GPUs hit the mainstream market so far, so who know what happened to it. 

With the possibility of an RTX 4070 blower-style card coming to the market, it raises the question: why are Nvidia's partners risking their R&D budget on products that will almost certainly be banned by Nvidia? We don't know the answer, but perhaps some of these manufacturers are going forward with prototype designs and hoping that one day Nvidia will greenlight production. This is more likely to be the case for the RTX 4070, since Nvidia technically only banned RTX xx90 blower-style GPUs, not the lower cards. 

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • I don't think there is anything illicit or illegal with this production move by Leadtek. After all, Nvidia only banned xx90 class blower-style GPUs, not the lower end SKUs.

    How is this one different ?
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    IMHO if I was an AIB i'd take this to court.
    They (nvidia) already started to shaft AIB by selling their own GPU at the MSRP forcing AIB to have to raise prices just to make profit.

    They don't let AIB do a lot of the stuff in old days to make their stuff unique (again limiting profit they can make off em)

    Telling em what cooler design they can or cant use? thats just stupid.

    No company should have that much control or say about what a company does with product they purchase & build around.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Metal Messiah. said:
    I don't think there is anything illicit or illegal with this production move by Leadtek.
    Illicit is a bit of an exaggeration. It may be against Nvidia's supply license, which could see Leadtek's chip supply reduced, axed or have penalties attached if Leadtek didn't ask for permission first and Nvidia decides to enforce it.
    Reply
  • ottonis
    Nvidia cannot "ban" any third party GPU cards. There's just no legal basis for that.
    They could only threaten the vendors not to sell them any GPUs anymore if they dare making those blower style cards.
    In that case, the top 5 vendors would just need to ignore nVidia's threats and go on making such cards - nVidia would singlehandedly destroy its own business should they still "ban" those companies.
    Reply
  • InvalidError said:
    Illicit is a bit of an exaggeration. It may be against Nvidia's supply license, which could see Leadtek's chip supply reduced, axed or have penalties attached if Leadtek didn't ask for permission first and Nvidia decides to enforce it.

    Yeah that kind of makes sense, but Nvidia should not be in a dominating position, just because they are scared that their own sales/profits are going to be affected if Leadtek or any other AIB starts selling blower-style GPUs at a lesser amount.

    I mean we know Nvidia wants to protect it's own HPC and professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards, it makes sense, but they shouldn't have FULL control over what other other vendors/AIBs do with their GPUs, in my opinion.

    That is, unless Nvidia has issued a serious warning before, that NO blower-type GPUs are allowed to be made by AIBs, without their permission , regardless of the GPU tier/class, 90/80/70/60. And not just xx90 class blower-style GPUs.

    I think in this case, Leadtek might have already taken prior permission from Nvidia, imo. Else, they won't do such a bold move just to know that their products are going to get banned later on, when Nvidia finds it in the market.
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    GPU's with Blower cooler are the cheapest .. and were the best choice for watercooling... blower cooled GPU are at least $100 cheaper if not more.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    There is a simple way to get around the "blower ban": slap on a straight-finned HSF like those found in datacenter GPUs and have the customer slap his own fans on the end (or setup stupidly high positive static pressure) to shove air through.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    Metal Messiah. said:
    Yeah that kind of makes sense, but Nvidia should not be in a dominating position, just because they are scared that their own sales/profits are going to be affected if Leadtek or any other AIB starts selling blower-style GPUs at a lesser amount.

    I mean we know Nvidia wants to protect it's own HPC and professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards, it makes sense, but they shouldn't have FULL control over what other other vendors/AIBs do with their GPUs, in my opinion.

    That is, unless Nvidia has issued a serious warning before, that NO blower-type GPUs are allowed to be made by AIBs, without their permission , regardless of the GPU tier/class, 90/80/70/60. And not just xx90 class blower-style GPUs.

    I think in this case, Leadtek might have already taken prior permission from Nvidia, imo. Else, they won't do such a bold move just to know that their products are going to get banned later on, when Nvidia finds it in the market.
    Anti trust regulation fails to work in these near monopoly situations. Sure Nvidia shouldn't have that type of control, but they do and just like Intel/Apple/Microsoft etc. did and do, they understand the risk of not exercising it even beyond the strictly legal, too.

    Actually, I'm quite surprised they lifted the restrictions on using CUDA in pass-through VMs, which was originally aimed against VDI use. I guess their motivation there was a bit like with Microsoft, where a too tough restriction on illegal (home-use) office only risked LibreOffice et. al. gaining to much market share and bleeding into corporate use.

    So they want to ensure that CUDA developers have easy access to ML hardware, but that ML operations be done only after paying the "green" tax.

    Perhaps after-market blower kits like the ones for water cooling would help bust their practise or a serious AMD offer with working pytorch support: Had AMD put their faith into the courts alone during the x86 patent disputes, they would have never survived even if Intel was finally proven guilty.

    Personally, I certainly dislike loosing all these slots to cards far too wide, but I also dislike water in my computers.

    A ribbon cable and upright mount may be advisable for physical stability in a tower chassis anyway, but the idea of signal integrity issues as a result isn't appealing.

    I guess there just isn't any good solution as we climb beyond 500 Watts on personal computers, especially in summer and without AC.
    Reply
  • crostini
    "If it comes out, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP."

    WAIT, WHAT? We have planning for 16GB 4070? I've heard the specifics on how this would be possible for a 4070, but I haven't heard if, or when this will happen. I am ready to get a new GPU so bad, and I'm still waiting due to the 4070 price and 12GB.
    Reply
  • dipique
    crostini said:
    "If it comes out, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP."

    WAIT, WHAT? We have planning for 16GB 4070? I've heard the specifics on how this would be possible for a 4070, but I haven't heard if, or when this will happen. I am ready to get a new GPU so bad, and I'm still waiting due to the 4070 price and 12GB.
    Given that the 4060 is coming out with a 16gb version it'd be shocking if the 4070 didn't.
    Reply