NVIDIA RTX 4090 “Ada” Founders Edition Cooler Spied, Retains Dual-Axial Flow-Through Design

In what is a sign that the July 2022 rumored debut of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada Lovelace” graphics card is on track; the first spy pictures of its Founders Edition cooler surfaced on ChipHell forums. The cooler appears to be an evolution of the Dual-Axial Flow-Through cooling architecture NVIDIA debuted with the RTX 30-series “Ampere” Founders Edition cards, where air is drawn in from one end of the card, flows through the cooling solution that’s a series of aluminium fin-stacks skewered by a series of heatpipes; and ventilated through the back of the card, with a second fan in “pull” configuration.

From the looks of it, the aluminium fins on the RTX 4090 Founders Edition cooler appears to have a dark-grey matte finish, which could indicate some form of ceramic surface-treatment that improves heat-dissipation; while the cooler’s base making primary contact with the GPU and memory chips, appears to be a vapor-chamber plate with a nickel-plated copper surface. From the location and sizes of the thermal pads for the memory chips, we guess that the GPU is surrounded by 10 memory chips, which could indicate a 320-bit memory interface, making this card a possible successor to the original RTX 3080. The cooler itself is more than 2 slots thick, and appears to be as thick as the RTX 3090 FE cooler.