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

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shikamaru317 said:

Basically the difference is that centrifugal (blower) coolers lock hot air inside the card's cooler shroud and continuously reblow it over the heat sink with greater air pressure than axial fans produce. Axial fans exhaust hot air outwards from the card, where the exhaust fans on your computer case can then blow the hot air out of your case, while your case's intake fans let in fresh cool air to replace it. It's my understanding that centrifugal (blower) fans run at higher speeds than axial fans usually, and therefore are a bit louder. Generally speaking both styles work well, it's just a matter of personal preference. I prefer my cards to be quiet, so I like axial fans. Others like to keep hot air trapped inside their graphics card, instead of letting it out into the computer case with the other PC components.

Edit: Sorry, I got part of that wrong. Blower coolers don't trap hot air in, they exhaust it out the back of the card, instead of into the case. However, because they only have 1 fan, that 1 fan typically runs at higher speeds than the 2 or 3 fans you usually find on axial cards, and therefore they produce more noise. So it's basically a choice between a quieter card that warms up the inside of your case more, or a louder card that exhausts hot air directly out of your case.

Lets not forget that blower fans do a singnifantly worse job at cooling the GPU. The only situation I can ever imagine them being the better choice is when you live in a very, very warm climate and have a very, very crappy case with no airflow. Or when you plan to construct a hybrid watercooled card, where the GPU is watercooled, while the VRAM and rest is cooled by the blower fan.

But lets face it, realistically, the blower fans are the worst choice. The GPUs run hotter, suffer from thermalthrottling (just look at all the videos with complains about the Founder Edition 1080s thermalthrottling), the card is lauder and the whole "cooking your hardware" argument is absurd, especialy when it comes to the new generation of 14 nm card. I'd never buy a card with blower cooling, unless I was going for watercooling and was about to ditch this cooling either way. Let's face, the GPU is the part that needs cooling the most, so the better you cool it, the better for you PC. And my case has 6 140mm fans, so I have no problem with airflow