A few generations ago, graphics cards with blower-style coolers were a common sight and the default cooler type on reference designs from both AMD and Nvidia. These days, they are quite rare – and mostly for good reasons since these simple, single-fan designs are pretty inefficient and noisy.
There is still some demand for blower-style cards, however. The main reasons are that they are compact and blow hot air out of the case, which makes them suitable for small form factor builds.
That said, no one probably expected a blower-style version of Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 4090, which comes with a TDP of 450 Watts. Chinese manufacturer Afox has nevertheless done exactly this with the Afox Geforce RTX 4090 (AF4090-24GD6XH4).
This is a dual-slot card that measures just 10.5 inches (266.5 mm), making it uniquely compact for an RTX 4090. It’s also the only RTX 4000-series card from Afox at this time. In terms of other specs, the card understandably sticks to the bare minimum, with no factory OC beyond Nvidia’s reference 2520 MHz boost clock. Power is supplied via a single 16-pin 12VHPWR connector located on the back of the card, while the video output ports include one HDMI 2.1 and three full-sized DisplayPort 1.4a.
The Afox blower-style card bucks the trend towards increasingly oversized graphics cards at the high end, as seen in other RTX 4090 cards until now, as well as all current Radeon RX 7900 XTX cards. Even many of today’s mid-range GPUs ship with large, triple-fan coolers.
Only a couple of generations ago, GPU cooling solutions did not have to consist of a giant heatsink with large axial fans – but there is no question that it helps keep the card cool and quiet. Prospective buyers should expect the Afox RTX 4090 to make a lot of noise while pushing hundreds of Watts worth of heat out of the case.
In other words, it is very much a niche card suited for those set on a very compact, high-end build or for less noise-sensitive use cases such as GPGPU compute in a server environment.
The Afox Geforce RTX 4090 is expected to launch this summer, but we could find no mention of pricing or availability at the time of writing.
