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Video card heat sinks - artistic flare involved?

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xrunner:
I was sorting through some computer junk parts and it got me thinking (I know - you thought you smelled smoke ...) about the heat sinks on some of these parts. In the pic I show a couple of video cards. Top one is an ASUS with Nvidea GPU and the bottom is an unnamed card with Raden GPU. It has a heat sin that seems, shall we say, utilitarian.

The Nvidia card has a very "stylish" heat sink, seemingly done with an artistic flare to attract attention. BUT - I am not a heat sink design expert so I do not know, perhaps it was done according to sound engineering design principles. Does anyone have an opinion on why the Nvidea design is so artsy looking? Does it work better than simply having plain vertical fins like the other card has?

thm_w:
Its for style points.
You can see they added more aluminum  over the GPU, and made the fins longer in the memory area. Would this have any significant effect compared to just having them all the same length? not really.
The top one is a 2 slot card, bottom one is a 1 slot card. So one may fit in your system, the other may not. The longer vs. shorter fins will make a difference here of course, as more material is used.

Apparently a good 3D printed heatsink design can net 20% reduction in material and 20% temperature decrease though, ending up with some wild shapes. At a large increase in cost. Extruded aluminum profiles like this are very cheap.



https://www.3dprinting.lighting/3d-printed-heat-sinks-display-higher-efficiency/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261918308237
https://www.digikey.com/Site/Global/Layouts/DownloadPdf.ashx?pdfUrl=F51974C9A6D544F1A7D8F119514B67FF
https://www.electroniclinic.com/heat-sink-types-of-heat-sink-and-design-of-heat-sink/

xrunner:

--- Quote from: thm_w on May 06, 2022, 12:30:26 am ---Its for style points.
You can see they added more aluminum  over the GPU, and made the fins longer in the memory area. Would this have any significant effect compared to just having them all the same length? not really.
The top one is a 2 slot card, bottom one is a 1 slot card. So one may fit in your system, the other may not. The longer vs. shorter fins will make a difference here of course, as more material is used.

--- End quote ---

That makes sense. The only thing I could come up with was that the curved fin patterns perhaps creates an air flow pattern due to different temps along the curves. Seemed like a whole lot of design effort for a little video card.

However; that effort made little sense to me because the case would have (or should have) fans moving air inside. So, what good would some slight airflow pattern do when much more air was moving anyway due to the fans.

But then again - they put the effort into the curvy design anyway ... I suppose for sales ...  :-//

Whales:
My favourite: https://i.redd.it/ig1gcft7d7941.jpg

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