To the chagrin of Nvidia and its CEO, one of its AIB partners, Manli, has built the world's first GeForce RTX 4090 blower-style graphics card with no repercussions. As Tweeted by Zed_Wang, Manli’s GeForce RTX 4090 would mark the return of a flagship GeForce graphics card with a blower-style cooling system.
The graphics card's unique cooling solution caters specifically to workstation systems, allowing multiple GPUs to stack inside a single tower for more computing power. As a result, we can expect Manli’s RTX 4090 graphics cards to start competing directly against Nvidia's more expensive Quadro GPUs once they arrive on the market. The new RTX 4090 blower is surprising and something we did not expect Nvidia to allow. If you don’t recall, the GeForce RTX 3090 previously arrived with blower designs, but the GeForce RTX 3090 blower cards magically disappeared from the market.
Before their discontinuation, these blower-style cards had a great run in the workstation market. OEMs and major system builders, such as Puget Systems, were building many PC setups with RTX 3090 graphics cards over Quadro GPUs. In addition, the transition to the RTX 3090 gave workstation systems significantly better price-to-performance ratios, with the RTX 3090 being just as powerful as some Quadro GPUs priced several thousand dollars higher.
Technically, there's nothing stopping workstations from using two RTX 3090s with a standard cooler design. However, the generated heat from two cards is so great that it can overwhelm the computer chassis' cooling solution - not to mention the additional spacing requirement you'll need for triple-slot GPUs. Blower-based graphics cards get around the problem by exhausting hot air out of the rear of the case by blocking off all sides of the cooler except the back. It allows multiple high-wattage GPUs to reside inside a large or small enclosure without compromising the system's cooling power.
Only time will tell if Manli’s GeForce RTX 4090 blower card suffers the same fate as the RTX 3090 blower-style GPUs.
The Manli RTX 4090 blower-style card is a very impressive GPU all on its own. Manli has circumvented the airflow limitations of the blower-style cooling design and shrunk this specific RTX 4090 to just two PCIe slots wide. It takes up less PCIe slots than the Founders Edition, making it the thinnest RTX 4090 to date - not accounting for AIO liquid-cooled versions of the RTX 4090.
It will make Manli's RTX 4090 blower extremely good for multi-GPU scenarios, allowing two of these GPUs to fit easily in a standard ATX tower. In fact, with the proper PCIe spacing, you could snuggle three or four of these GPUs into a full tower chassis and get away with it.
We don't expect this GPU to operate at peak boost frequencies due to the compact nature of the cooler design. Still, that sacrifice is more than worth it if you can squeeze multiple RTX 4090s into a single machine or a single RTX 4090 into a chassis that only supports dual slot cards.
