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

[JEMC]

Chazore said:
That 1080 doing well over 60fps at 4k is also pretty nice. Still it's most likely going to be the card I grab next year for a new build, unless AMD release one better than the 1080 at a cheaper price (likely won't happen).

That depends on when is next year. After all, early next year Nvidia will launch the GP102 chipset that will power the next Titan and Ti cards. And, unless Nvidia has completely lost its mind, the GTX 1080 will lower its price accordingly.

Oh, and who knows when Vega will launch: http://videocardz.com/61361/amd-confirms-vega-10-gpu-reaching-development-milestone

Slimebeast said:

JEMC said:

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.

*pics*

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?

There are actually two kind of CPU coolers too (three if we add the closed liquid coolers): towers and low profile.

The low profile ones are like the reference coolers from Intel or AMD, although there are some big monsters from other brands like Noctua. They work like an axial cooler from a GPU: a fan that pushes air through a heatsink that sits on top of the CPU. They have the advantage that they also cool the components  surrounding the CPU, but they do it with hot air.

Tower coolers are the most common ones, and also the ones that give best results. There are lots and lots of examples and sizes, with some of them weighing over 1Kg. The cooler sits on top of the CPU, with heat rising over the heatpipes to a stack of fins where the air from one or two fans get rid of them.

 

And no, you shouldn't have to had any problem for having your case open. There are plenty of open air cases our there. As long as you CPU and GPU are well cooler by their respective coolers, you'll be fine.

Many review sites test their CPU and GPU on an open air bench, to make the work of replace the components a lot easier.