A new listing from the National Radio Research Agency in Korea confirms that an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card with blower-style cooling might be in the works by GPU manufacturer Leadtek. The intended role of this GPU would be professional use — not gaming — with a focus on AI-intensive workloads.
We know basically nothing about this new GPU — all we know is the model name from the listing, which reads "RTX 4070 AI BLOWER," as well as the manufacturer (Leadtek). But even with this limited information, it's clear this card is not aimed at gamers, but is designed specifically for the server/workstation market. If it comes out, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP.
Blower-style coolers have become exceedingly rare in the consumer space since Nvidia shifted the cooler designs for its Founders Edition cards from vapor chamber blower-style coolers to standard dual-fan coolers, starting with the RTX 20 series. Since then, Nvidia has become incredibly opposed to AIB partners using blower-style coolers in the brand's mainstream GeForce-branded gaming graphics cards.
We suspect one reason Nvidia changed its position on blower-style coolers is to prevent competition between its consumer GeForce GPUs and its professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards. Nvidia's professional GPUs are built almost entirely with blower-style coolers in order to squeeze as many GPUs as possible into a single workstation/server chassis. The problem is that Nvidia's Quadro and A-series GPUs are much more expensive than their GeForce counterparts, meaning any high-performing GeForce card with blower-style cooling would bring in far less profit than a professional GPU.
Nvidia banned AIB partners from making RTX 3090 blower-style cards back in 2021. At the time, several partners had blower-style RTX 3090 cards on the market, and many of them were being used by system builders, such as Puget Systems, to build multi-GPU RTX 3090 workstations. Unfortunately Nvidia caught wind of the workaround and decided to ban the practice altogether — though the company didn't ban RTX 3080 or RTX 3070 blower-style cards, just the RTX 3090 versions.
The strange part of this story is that Nvidia never officially banned high-end blower-style coolers after that, from what we can tell. We saw an RTX 4090 blower-style card several months ago, which looked like a pre-production sample that was basically production-ready. But we have not seen any blower-style RTX 40 series GPUs hit the mainstream market so far, so who know what happened to it.
With the possibility of an RTX 4070 blower-style card coming to the market, it raises the question: why are Nvidia's partners risking their R&D budget on products that will almost certainly be banned by Nvidia? We don't know the answer, but perhaps some of these manufacturers are going forward with prototype designs and hoping that one day Nvidia will greenlight production. This is more likely to be the case for the RTX 4070, since Nvidia technically only banned RTX xx90 blower-style GPUs, not the lower cards.
