Swivellable fans… right on!
Sparkle are innovating over on their booth at Computex 2008 with two products that, although I can see the point, at the same time leave me asking the question ‘Why?’. The first is the Dual Fly cooling system on their GeForce 9800 GTX graphics card. At first glance it looks pretty good.. there’s no enormous housing filling up precious space in your PC and all that… but that’s just me preferring more open cooling solutions than all this ducted stuff.But then Sparkle have gone a step further by making the fans tiltable, so you can angle them up by around 10 degrees… which is where the ‘Why?’ question comes in. Well apparently, having the fans angled up increases the airflow over the rest of the PCB, giving more efficient cooling if the card is under load.
Click for larger imageNow if there was an adult education class for thermodynamics and heat exchange through alloys using forced airflows, I’d be the one sitting right at the front with an utterly confused look on my face. But I can’t help but think that when a card is under load you want the fans as close as possible to the cooling fins? And if it is more efficient with the fans angled up, why not just build it like that anyway?
Click for larger imageBut Sparkle have thought of the pain in the bum it’ll be to have to open up your case and push the Dual Fly fans into position depending on what you want to do as they’ll be bringing out a motorised version pretty soon. Hopefully, you can link this up to the GBOX, a drive bay mounted control and monitoring panel that let’s you see how your card is doing and fiddle about with fan speeds etc.
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