Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

[Slimebeast]

JEMC said:

Slimebeast said:

I have never heard about this. How can I see the difference between a blower fan and axial fan? If I look inside my computer case, is there an easy way to see which is which from all the fans inside (PSU, GPU, CPU etc)?

I assume blowing fan is most common from the way you two speak.

For example my Gigabyte R9 290 Windforce, what are those fans?

That's an axial card.

A blower card, which tipically are all reference cards, have a fan in one extreme that moves air through the card and the heatsink and exhausts the warm air out of back of the card, out the case.

An axial cooler, as most if not all third party coolers like the Gigabyte Windforce one of your pic are, directs the air directly to the heatsink(s), but the resulting warm air is exhausted in the case, not out. That means that you need a case with good airflow or your components will get cooked by their own generated heat.

Ahh... so they're fundamentally different. And for CPU it's always axial cooling, yes?

So in simple terms, axial is better to cool the card but at the expense of the whole system?

My computer case is open because I've been lazy to put back the case wall after I've been tampering with the hardware. Is that good or bad for the cooling of the system?