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PNY RTX 4070 with blower cooler quietly released in China
PNY shadow dropped a new model of the GeForce RTX 4070 that features a blower type cooling system last week. Currently, it is only available in China.
What’s the difference between blower coolers and open-air graphics cards?
Open-air coolers have exposed heatsinks, to allow the warm air exhaust to escape in all directions. The air is taken in via several axial fans and pushed through the heatsink before being expelled out to the case interior. The heatsink usually spans the entire width of the graphics card circuit board.
Blower coolers’ heatsinks are fully enclosed, meaning that once the air enters, it becomes trapped and can only move out in a single direction. It works by sucking the air through a single fan and blowing it along the length of the graphics card before expelling the warmed air directly out of the case.
Blower type coolers are not the quietest, but they are definitely ones to consider when it comes to cooling down graphics cards that emit 200 to 300W of heat in tight places, blower coolers offer the best cooling currently available.
Using blower coolers on consumers cards is less commonly used by Nvidia or its partners, as using this kind of cooling system has the potential to rival professional graphics cards – the majority of Nvidia’s RTX branded professional cards all come equipped with blower coolers. And like its professional brothers, the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 blower model doesn’t come cheap. Aimed more towards AI developers than gamers, it’s priced at around $966 (around £760). It’s unclear whether these cards will be available for purchase outside of China, but they can be shipped outside of the country.
Asus showcases new RTX 4060 concept
Tony Yu of ASUS showcased a new concept of their RTX 4060 model this week, displaying the novel idea of having an actual Gen 4 M.2 SSD running alongside the GPU. Attaching it to the backside of the GPU via a cut out part, the SSD is easy to access and install, and the backplate acts as a heatsink for the SSD also.
So the first question is why? Why have an SSD piggybacking on your graphics card? Well the most obvious answer is: why not? It’s a way to utilise the unused PCIe lanes, and it’s a way to keep your SSDs in a neat and tidy place using the RTX 4060’s feature of their additional x8 lane, so it was a foregone conclusion.
This new place of the SSD makes changing it from inside even easier, negating the multiple steps usually required for mounting a new SSD. For those of us that frequently change out their SSDs, this may turn out to be a game changer.
Asus has thought of the possibility of temperature issues and have kept this in mind, modifying the PCB so that the GPU’s cooling can reach the SSD. With the SSD using the much more powerful cooling of the GPU, the initial testing revealed as much as a 10 degree C drop of the SSD temperature.
Further tests revealed the SSD suffered no performance issues from its new home compared to being connected to a Gen 4 motherboard. Temperatures were recording over 50C under full stress. It will save costs compared to buying an extension card. We are excited to see what will evolve from these new concepts, and the future of computer components.
RTX 4060 Ti 16GB release date leaked?
Nvidia are going all in with their affordable range of graphics cards for their customers, and we may have a potential release date for their newest one, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB.
Promising to combine affordable prices with 16GB of memory, we were expecting to see their 4060 Ti early last month, but it was a no-show. According to hardware leaker Zed_Wang, the release date could be as close as mid-July. Zed_Wang is a known credible leaker, but as it is unofficial news, this is subject to change.
The date given by Zed_Wang was July 18th 2023 according to the document excerpts they tweeted. Expecting a boost in performance from the 8GB version, and with that naturally comes a higher price. With newer games getting more and more demanding for memory, most gamers are happy to future proof their graphics cards for a little bit extra to guarantee performance.
World of games
Call of Duty making life hell for cheaters
In their newest blog, Call of Duty are targeting cheaters by providing them with hallucinations.
In a move that echoes the plot of movies such as Jacob’s Ladder and Deathwatch, players found to have cheating software installed are being targeted by software designed to mess up their games and simultaneously call them out to other players as cheaters.
Using what they called “Mitigations”, the software allows Team Ricochet to analyse cheater behaviour rather than simply banning them, whilst also maintaining other players’ fun without causing disruption.
This newest Mitigation, merely called “Hallucination”, places computer character players in the game that only the cheater can see. According to Team Ricochet, they are undetectable to legitimate players and cannot impact their performance or stats. What these decoys will provide however, is a way to disorient cheaters in numerous different ways.
Acting like real people, the decoys will be played close to a cheater, and if the player then interacts with the decoy, they will automatically out themselves to the other players, who can then take appropriate action. The Mitigation can be deployed to known cheaters and suspected cheaters.
With Hallucination in full swing, Team Ricochet has removed their previous one, Quicksand, which slowed or even froze cheaters, or sometimes reassigned mapped keys for a less than pleasant experience. Although quite satisfying retribution-wise, the visual Quicksand provided could prove to be quite distracting for other players, and so it was removed.
And finally…
Mark Zuckerberg’s and Elon Musk’s rivalry hits a new head as Twitter rival Threads was released by Meta this Thursday.
Twitter been facing various controversies in many people’s eyes: in recent decisions that have mostly baffled its users, starting with removing two-step verification to users not subscribed to Twitter Blue, to data limiting the number of tweets a user can see per day, many people are searching for a new alternative, and Meta was only too happy to oblige. They were very clear in their marketing that the app is a free service with no restrictions of how many posts a user would be able to see, responding to Twitter’s popular user dashboard TweetDeck will go behind a paywall soon.
10 million sign ups in just under ten hours showed just how much people were missing this form of social media, and now we at least know where those fired Twitter engineers ended up. It remains to be seen if Threads really is the next Twitter, as several clones have sprung up in the past attempting to capitalise on the model, but Meta has the advantage of a pre-built database to use, so we will see if Threads really becomes the new place for people to connect.
Speaking of social media…
We're also on Threads, so hit us up at @direct.computers and keep up to date!
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