A new rumour claims that Nvidia is considering and testing multiple cooler designs reaching up to 600W of heat dissipation. While this doesn’t confirm any particular power consumption, it indicates that Team Green isn’t against trading wattage for extra oomph.
According to Benchlife, Nvidia is testing four different cooling solutions for its next-gen GeForce RTX 5000 series of GPUs. These are said to range from a reasonable 250W to a hot 600W. Just to be clear here, we are talking about heat dissipation capabilities and not the power consumed by the graphics card. That said, why would Nvidia develop such a beast if it has no plans for a GPU that needs it.
Interestingly, this is not the first time we’ve heard of a monster cooler from Nvidia. If you remember, we had leaked pictures of a quad-slot prototype cooler supposedly destined for RTX 4090 Ti. This one was rated for an even higher 900W of heat dissipation.
Seeing how an RTX 4090 operates at around 450W even though its board can take 600W, we wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia is simply leaving some headroom to reduce fan speeds.
Regardless of its cooling capacity, the size and noise it produces will make or break it. While many chassis nowadays take into account triple-slot cards, adding a fourth may be too much asking. Especially as it would cover some of the PCIe expansion slots.
But as usual, with rumours and leaks, we must take them with a grain of salt and wait for official announcements. In this case, Nvidia is said to unveil the Blackwell RTX 5000 GPUs before the end of the year, with retail availability in late 2024 or early 2025.