**Comparing Open-Air and Blower-Style Graphics Cards**

The SG 13 case with decent ventilation proved to be an excellent choice for our RT X 2070 Super card, providing the best GPU thermals out of the four cases tested. The blower card allowed our Rison processor to run around five and a half degrees cooler, which is a significant advantage in this setup. However, we noticed that the CPU temperature was about eight and a half degrees warmer with the open-air card configuration.

In contrast, the blower-style graphics cards showed promising thermal designs, but they fell short in terms of cooling performance when compared to our open-air card. The GPU clock speeds were only about 40 megahertz faster than the Isuzu turbo blower card, which may not be noticeable in most games. Additionally, the CPU thermals with the open-air card were significantly warmer, indicating that the hot air from the graphics card was affecting the CPU temperature.

The Sentry 2.0 case presented an interesting thermal design challenge due to its slim console lock form factor. The graphics card was connected via a two-piece riser card that stacked it above the motherboard and power supply. This setup allowed for ample ventilation at the top, but the heat also directed towards the motherboard, trapping some of it inside the case. As a result, we saw more thermal differences between the open-air and blower-style graphics cards in this configuration.

**Performance Comparison**

In our tests, the GPU thermals were fairly close between the two configurations, with only about one to two degree difference. However, for CPU temperatures, we saw an eight and a half-degree warmer result with the blower card. This significant difference highlights the importance of proper cooling design for both GPUs and CPUs in compact cases.

The noise levels also played a crucial role in our comparison. The blower-style graphics cards created a louder system due to their fans, which was still audible even at 30 minutes of continuous operation. However, if we were to run a fan curve instead, the two configurations might become closer in terms of noise levels.

**Recommendations**

For users building small form-factor cases or gaming rigs with limited volume, we highly recommend an open-air graphics card for its more effective cooling design and lower temperatures. While the thermal design of blower-style cards is promising, they often rely on cheaper components to achieve their performance claims. In certain situations, such as slim console-like cases or scenarios where CPU thermals are critical, blower cards can be beneficial.

However, when building in a small space, we recommend opting for the largest graphics card that will fit inside the case. This usually provides the best performance and cooling solution. Additionally, users should keep an eye on CPU cooler thermal increases relative to what they'll get with a blower card. A more premium cooling solution often means better overall system temperatures.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our tests demonstrated the importance of proper cooling design in compact cases. While both open-air and blower-style graphics cards have their strengths and weaknesses, we recommend an open-air card for most users due to its more effective cooling solution and lower temperatures. However, users should consider their specific needs and case constraints when making a decision.

**Recommendations for Open-Air Graphics Cards**

For those looking to build in small form-factor cases, we recommend the following:

* Check out our recommended list of top open-air graphics cards.

* Consider the largest graphics card that will fit inside your case.

* Keep an eye on CPU cooler thermal increases relative to what you'll get with a blower card.

* Don't be afraid to consider manual tuning or under-volting to optimize performance.

**Recommendations for Blower-Style Graphics Cards**

For users who may benefit from the benefits of blower-style graphics cards, we recommend:

* Consider the advantages of blower-style graphics cards in slim console-like cases or scenarios where CPU thermals are critical.

* Look for high-quality blower-style graphics card designs that prioritize thermal performance and noise reduction.

* Be aware that blower-style graphics cards often rely on cheaper components to achieve their performance claims.

**Final Thoughts**

In the world of compact gaming PCs, cooling design is everything. While both open-air and blower-style graphics cards have their strengths and weaknesses, we recommend an open-air card for most users due to its more effective cooling solution and lower temperatures. By considering your specific needs and case constraints, you can make an informed decision that ensures optimal performance and thermal comfort in your gaming rig.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ena couple of months ago we discussed whether it was better to go for a blow of style graphics card or an open-air graphics card for your I TX build and the results showed that overall maybe blow style cards honest bad as they're said to be the testing showed that a blow style graphics card like this one is actually really effective in getting all the hot air out of the case and we saw a massive drop in CPU thermals when compared to an open-air card that's kind of the risk that you run with an open-air card like this one in a small form-factor case there's not much room for all of that hot air to go seeing as it is dumped back into the case and it can be recirculated to the other components like the CPU cooler and the power supply now in that video we used two fairly similar GPUs in terms of power output a gtx 1070 blower and an RT x 2060 super founders edition with a slightly higher power target as i mentioned in that video though that's kind of what you can expect between a blog card and an open-air card of the same model usually the open air models will have a slightly higher power target and boost clock today though we're retesting this but with two of the same GPUs both are TX 2070 Super's this allows for much stricter comparisons as well as more direct comparisons like noise and boost clocks so if you are tossing out between an open-air graphics card and a blower style graphics card for your ITX build we have a final answer for you today and just like the initial video I think a lot of you are going to be surprised by some of these results so here are the two cards that we're comparing today both are our TX 2070 supers for our open-air card we have the Nvidia founders Edition and for our blower card we have the turbo from a soos one interesting note is that compatibility wise these two cards are almost identical in every aspect both cards are about 268 millimeters in length 115 mils in height and both are exactly two slots both take an 8 + 6 pin power connector and the TDP is supposedly the same at 215 watts the open-air card does have a slightly higher boost clock of 1800 megahertz versus the 1770 megahertz on the ball style card but we'll take a closer look at this in just a minute I will quickly say that the asustor turbo is one of the better-looking blower cards that I've seen out there the design is fairly neutral and understated unfortunately no backplate here but that's pretty common with these affordable models also if you plan on using multiple of these cards in a single workstation stacked closely together there is a small raised lip at the corner of the card so that the fan is never completely blocked off in that situation now the whole point of this video is to explore the different thermal outcomes of using a blower style graphics card versus an open-air one depending on the case you are using for example some more well ventilated cases like the ghost s1 theoretically could be better for an open-air card seeing as this card will have no problem exhausting that heat out of the case but then for example consider something like the Sentry 2.0 or the node 202 something more slim and closed off theoretically a blower style card might be more beneficial there seeing as it can evacuate all that heat out of the case so the cases that we're testing today include the two cases that we tested in the initial video the ghost s1 and the sentry to the point oh but also the silverstone SG 13 and the new NZXT h1 all four of these cases represent different layouts and approaches to thermal design and the result between blower versus open air could be different in either one for example the ghost s1 represents what you can expect in a very compact sandwich layout case that has a decent ventilation all around but no active exhaust the results here for example would carry on two other cases with similar design layouts like the den a for now a quick mention on some of the testing methodology when it comes to comparing these two cards in various cases for each case I have used the best CPU cooling solution that the case will support for example a 120 mm AO in the SG 13 and seeing as we're also measuring CPU thermals I have locked the CPU frequency voltage LLC and fan speed for all of these tests that way we can see the accurate thermal impact between blower and open air cards lastly we're using a heaven 4.0 benchmark loop at 1440p ultra settings this is run for 30 minutes for each test to allow each cases interior to warm up sufficiently and the room ambient has been controlled and monitored to stay at 21 degrees C exactly alright first up let's start with the ghost s1 an iconic SFF case that took the sandwich layout of the den a4 and stretched it up to an eight liter volume with thicker panels being a sandwich layout case the CPU and GPU are called in compartments that are separated by an interior wall but the results here showed that the heat can still make its way between the two chambers let's start with GPU thermals and here we have the blower card around 7 degrees warmer than the open air card by the way the values that you see here are the rounded averages for the final 2 minutes for the test so this result is not too surprising the founders Edition 2070 super does have a larger cooler at the end of the day and this is a pretty well ventilated case the interesting part is when we take a look at the CPU thermals during the same test in the test system we're using the risin 5 3600 and we've locked that to 4.2 gigahertz at 1.2 volts now despite the open air card itself running cooler than the blower card here we can see that a lot of the heat from the open air card is dumped towards the CPU cooler creating over a 10 degree warmer result the blower card on the other hand effectively removes the heat from the case and keeps the Rison v 3600 running a lot cooler and a quick look at the GPU clock speed here basically we just want to see whether either blower or open-air card is reducing the clock speeds over time both are relatively stable here the card is definitely a lot more sporadic seeing as it's running at a thermal constraint and on average clocks were 25 megahertz lower than the founders Edition all right next up let's take a look at the NZXT h1 a recent case release that I'm actually a huge fan of and the results here are super interesting this is a thirteen point five liter vertical case with the motherboard and GPU i/o facing downwards that means that the exhaust heat from a blow style card actually gets exhausted and trapped below the case open air cards aren't too much better though the issue there is that hot air gets trapped against that tempered glass front panel so starting with GPU thermals and yep you should definitely avoid a blower style card for this case no question about it now for the ghost s1 you probably remembered me saying that the RT acts 20:7 a super blower card was running at a thermal limit of 83 degrees C and as I understand that these are TX GPUs have two thermal limits one is kind of a happy limit or a soft limit 83 say in this case which the card will do some minor throttling to stay below or around we saw this in the previous chart with the ghost s1 then there's a hard limit or a complete maximum which the card won't never exceed 88 see looking at the spec sheet for this GPU where the card will throttle as much as it reasonably can to stay below now looking at CPU temperatures during the same test they're a lot closer than what we saw in the ghost s1 so here both graphics cards thermal designs are warming up the CPU cooler and chamber about the same amount with the open-air card actually running two degrees cooler finally GPU clock speed between the two where we see the most dramatic difference of all of the cases tested here again blower style cards are an absolute note for this case on average we're seeing clock speeds about 130 mega Hertz lower than the open air card next up let's take a look at the Silverstone SG 13 this is an 11 leader case that has been around for quite a while but I only recently picked it up for a mainstream gaming build and I'm really happy that I did the thermal design here is pretty conventional and basic no use of risers or creative layouts just a small compact microwave looking case with a decent amount of ventilation and that amount of ventilation sure does help us a ton because the SG 13 gives us the best GPU thermals out of the four cases tested for our RT X 2070 super at 74 degrees C it's quite happy and steady at those thermals - maintaining a nine degree cooler result compared to the blower card for CPU thermals the blower card allows our Rison processor to run around five and a half degrees cooler seeing as we're running a 120mm front mounted radiator here it's not too influenced by the internal temperature of the case GPU clock speeds show the founders addition card around 40 megahertz faster than the Isuzu turbo blower card this isn't a huge margin and you wouldn't see any perceivable difference in games overall an open-air card is definitely favorable in this case when running a front-mounted liquid cooler lastly we have the Sentry 2.0 representing the slim console lock form factor that's very popular among ITX cases here the graphics card is connected via a two-piece riser card that stacks it above the motherboard and the power supply a lot of the heat from an open-air card here gets exhausted out of the case thanks to the ample ventilation at the top but the other half gets directed towards the motherboard and trapped inside the case overall the results here with the most promising in favor of the blower card GPU thermals are fairly close between them only a one to two degree difference but for CPU thermals we see around an eight and a half degree warmer result for the CPU now that's pretty significant if we were running a more power hungry CPU like the 3700 X or 9700 K that could be enough to push the CPU into some very warm levels for GPU clock speed we can see that the blower card although the thermal design here is promising the clock speeds are still throttling and bumping around a bit you could definitely bypass this with a bit of under vaulting and manual tuning but that's completely up to the user to do lastly let's take a look at noise levels between each configuration this is the noise level of the entire system after 30 minutes of the heaven 4.0 loop and we can see that the blower card creates a louder system everything time however one thing to keep note of here is that the CPU fan speed was locked at a constant speed but if you were to run a fan curve instead you might actually see the two results become a bit closer that's because for the open-air card configuration the CPU thermals ran warm-up for all tests except for in the NZXT h1 and this in turn would raise the CPU coolers fans to get an idea of what the two cards sound like at load here's a quick sample from the ghost s1 testing as well as a noise normalized thermal result so open-air graphics card undoubtedly are the more popular choice for you know users who are even going for the small form-factor builds and a really constrained volume and I do believe that to be the right choice because even if you are warming up the CPU by five to ten degrees because that hot air can't really fully escape the case you are overall getting a much more effective cooling design for the GPU itself however the thermal design of a blower card is promising and there are use cases where they are beneficial for example in slim console-like cases where the hot air from an open air card gets trapped and circulated back to the CPU blower cards are very useful there also in gaming builds where CPU thermals are riding on the edge of what is safe and where an open-air card would otherwise increase those thermals even further under sustained load the main drawback that I see with blow style graphics cards is that you're just getting a cheaper cooling design overall because card makers consider this the kind of budget oriented and you know more affordable graphics card solution it's also you know one way that they can upsell you to a dual fan or triple fan model by saying the thermals and noise levels are better there so there's definitely not a whole lot of Aharon T that goes into making a blow style graphics card as good as it can be so for most users looking to build in a small form-factor case I do still recommend an open-air graphics card because again you are just getting a more premium cooling solution most of the time if you can go for the biggest card that will fit in the particular case that you're going with usually that is the best option just be mindful of the CPU cooler thermal increases relative to what you'll get with a blower card and lastly if you are looking to pick up a new compact case or maybe a new graphics card either blow up or open air I will leave some recommendations down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next onea couple of months ago we discussed whether it was better to go for a blow of style graphics card or an open-air graphics card for your I TX build and the results showed that overall maybe blow style cards honest bad as they're said to be the testing showed that a blow style graphics card like this one is actually really effective in getting all the hot air out of the case and we saw a massive drop in CPU thermals when compared to an open-air card that's kind of the risk that you run with an open-air card like this one in a small form-factor case there's not much room for all of that hot air to go seeing as it is dumped back into the case and it can be recirculated to the other components like the CPU cooler and the power supply now in that video we used two fairly similar GPUs in terms of power output a gtx 1070 blower and an RT x 2060 super founders edition with a slightly higher power target as i mentioned in that video though that's kind of what you can expect between a blog card and an open-air card of the same model usually the open air models will have a slightly higher power target and boost clock today though we're retesting this but with two of the same GPUs both are TX 2070 Super's this allows for much stricter comparisons as well as more direct comparisons like noise and boost clocks so if you are tossing out between an open-air graphics card and a blower style graphics card for your ITX build we have a final answer for you today and just like the initial video I think a lot of you are going to be surprised by some of these results so here are the two cards that we're comparing today both are our TX 2070 supers for our open-air card we have the Nvidia founders Edition and for our blower card we have the turbo from a soos one interesting note is that compatibility wise these two cards are almost identical in every aspect both cards are about 268 millimeters in length 115 mils in height and both are exactly two slots both take an 8 + 6 pin power connector and the TDP is supposedly the same at 215 watts the open-air card does have a slightly higher boost clock of 1800 megahertz versus the 1770 megahertz on the ball style card but we'll take a closer look at this in just a minute I will quickly say that the asustor turbo is one of the better-looking blower cards that I've seen out there the design is fairly neutral and understated unfortunately no backplate here but that's pretty common with these affordable models also if you plan on using multiple of these cards in a single workstation stacked closely together there is a small raised lip at the corner of the card so that the fan is never completely blocked off in that situation now the whole point of this video is to explore the different thermal outcomes of using a blower style graphics card versus an open-air one depending on the case you are using for example some more well ventilated cases like the ghost s1 theoretically could be better for an open-air card seeing as this card will have no problem exhausting that heat out of the case but then for example consider something like the Sentry 2.0 or the node 202 something more slim and closed off theoretically a blower style card might be more beneficial there seeing as it can evacuate all that heat out of the case so the cases that we're testing today include the two cases that we tested in the initial video the ghost s1 and the sentry to the point oh but also the silverstone SG 13 and the new NZXT h1 all four of these cases represent different layouts and approaches to thermal design and the result between blower versus open air could be different in either one for example the ghost s1 represents what you can expect in a very compact sandwich layout case that has a decent ventilation all around but no active exhaust the results here for example would carry on two other cases with similar design layouts like the den a for now a quick mention on some of the testing methodology when it comes to comparing these two cards in various cases for each case I have used the best CPU cooling solution that the case will support for example a 120 mm AO in the SG 13 and seeing as we're also measuring CPU thermals I have locked the CPU frequency voltage LLC and fan speed for all of these tests that way we can see the accurate thermal impact between blower and open air cards lastly we're using a heaven 4.0 benchmark loop at 1440p ultra settings this is run for 30 minutes for each test to allow each cases interior to warm up sufficiently and the room ambient has been controlled and monitored to stay at 21 degrees C exactly alright first up let's start with the ghost s1 an iconic SFF case that took the sandwich layout of the den a4 and stretched it up to an eight liter volume with thicker panels being a sandwich layout case the CPU and GPU are called in compartments that are separated by an interior wall but the results here showed that the heat can still make its way between the two chambers let's start with GPU thermals and here we have the blower card around 7 degrees warmer than the open air card by the way the values that you see here are the rounded averages for the final 2 minutes for the test so this result is not too surprising the founders Edition 2070 super does have a larger cooler at the end of the day and this is a pretty well ventilated case the interesting part is when we take a look at the CPU thermals during the same test in the test system we're using the risin 5 3600 and we've locked that to 4.2 gigahertz at 1.2 volts now despite the open air card itself running cooler than the blower card here we can see that a lot of the heat from the open air card is dumped towards the CPU cooler creating over a 10 degree warmer result the blower card on the other hand effectively removes the heat from the case and keeps the Rison v 3600 running a lot cooler and a quick look at the GPU clock speed here basically we just want to see whether either blower or open-air card is reducing the clock speeds over time both are relatively stable here the card is definitely a lot more sporadic seeing as it's running at a thermal constraint and on average clocks were 25 megahertz lower than the founders Edition all right next up let's take a look at the NZXT h1 a recent case release that I'm actually a huge fan of and the results here are super interesting this is a thirteen point five liter vertical case with the motherboard and GPU i/o facing downwards that means that the exhaust heat from a blow style card actually gets exhausted and trapped below the case open air cards aren't too much better though the issue there is that hot air gets trapped against that tempered glass front panel so starting with GPU thermals and yep you should definitely avoid a blower style card for this case no question about it now for the ghost s1 you probably remembered me saying that the RT acts 20:7 a super blower card was running at a thermal limit of 83 degrees C and as I understand that these are TX GPUs have two thermal limits one is kind of a happy limit or a soft limit 83 say in this case which the card will do some minor throttling to stay below or around we saw this in the previous chart with the ghost s1 then there's a hard limit or a complete maximum which the card won't never exceed 88 see looking at the spec sheet for this GPU where the card will throttle as much as it reasonably can to stay below now looking at CPU temperatures during the same test they're a lot closer than what we saw in the ghost s1 so here both graphics cards thermal designs are warming up the CPU cooler and chamber about the same amount with the open-air card actually running two degrees cooler finally GPU clock speed between the two where we see the most dramatic difference of all of the cases tested here again blower style cards are an absolute note for this case on average we're seeing clock speeds about 130 mega Hertz lower than the open air card next up let's take a look at the Silverstone SG 13 this is an 11 leader case that has been around for quite a while but I only recently picked it up for a mainstream gaming build and I'm really happy that I did the thermal design here is pretty conventional and basic no use of risers or creative layouts just a small compact microwave looking case with a decent amount of ventilation and that amount of ventilation sure does help us a ton because the SG 13 gives us the best GPU thermals out of the four cases tested for our RT X 2070 super at 74 degrees C it's quite happy and steady at those thermals - maintaining a nine degree cooler result compared to the blower card for CPU thermals the blower card allows our Rison processor to run around five and a half degrees cooler seeing as we're running a 120mm front mounted radiator here it's not too influenced by the internal temperature of the case GPU clock speeds show the founders addition card around 40 megahertz faster than the Isuzu turbo blower card this isn't a huge margin and you wouldn't see any perceivable difference in games overall an open-air card is definitely favorable in this case when running a front-mounted liquid cooler lastly we have the Sentry 2.0 representing the slim console lock form factor that's very popular among ITX cases here the graphics card is connected via a two-piece riser card that stacks it above the motherboard and the power supply a lot of the heat from an open-air card here gets exhausted out of the case thanks to the ample ventilation at the top but the other half gets directed towards the motherboard and trapped inside the case overall the results here with the most promising in favor of the blower card GPU thermals are fairly close between them only a one to two degree difference but for CPU thermals we see around an eight and a half degree warmer result for the CPU now that's pretty significant if we were running a more power hungry CPU like the 3700 X or 9700 K that could be enough to push the CPU into some very warm levels for GPU clock speed we can see that the blower card although the thermal design here is promising the clock speeds are still throttling and bumping around a bit you could definitely bypass this with a bit of under vaulting and manual tuning but that's completely up to the user to do lastly let's take a look at noise levels between each configuration this is the noise level of the entire system after 30 minutes of the heaven 4.0 loop and we can see that the blower card creates a louder system everything time however one thing to keep note of here is that the CPU fan speed was locked at a constant speed but if you were to run a fan curve instead you might actually see the two results become a bit closer that's because for the open-air card configuration the CPU thermals ran warm-up for all tests except for in the NZXT h1 and this in turn would raise the CPU coolers fans to get an idea of what the two cards sound like at load here's a quick sample from the ghost s1 testing as well as a noise normalized thermal result so open-air graphics card undoubtedly are the more popular choice for you know users who are even going for the small form-factor builds and a really constrained volume and I do believe that to be the right choice because even if you are warming up the CPU by five to ten degrees because that hot air can't really fully escape the case you are overall getting a much more effective cooling design for the GPU itself however the thermal design of a blower card is promising and there are use cases where they are beneficial for example in slim console-like cases where the hot air from an open air card gets trapped and circulated back to the CPU blower cards are very useful there also in gaming builds where CPU thermals are riding on the edge of what is safe and where an open-air card would otherwise increase those thermals even further under sustained load the main drawback that I see with blow style graphics cards is that you're just getting a cheaper cooling design overall because card makers consider this the kind of budget oriented and you know more affordable graphics card solution it's also you know one way that they can upsell you to a dual fan or triple fan model by saying the thermals and noise levels are better there so there's definitely not a whole lot of Aharon T that goes into making a blow style graphics card as good as it can be so for most users looking to build in a small form-factor case I do still recommend an open-air graphics card because again you are just getting a more premium cooling solution most of the time if you can go for the biggest card that will fit in the particular case that you're going with usually that is the best option just be mindful of the CPU cooler thermal increases relative to what you'll get with a blower card and lastly if you are looking to pick up a new compact case or maybe a new graphics card either blow up or open air I will leave some recommendations down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one\n"