Someone Made a Fanless RTX 3080

The founder of Turemetal Huang Chunhui, better known as Mical Wong, found a way to cool one of NVIDIA's most popular and best-performing graphics cards passively. In a recent tweet, Mical showed a fanless set-up for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 in a demonstration that is almost unsustainable and not recommended for actual use.

Turemetal, a Chinese company founded by Huang Chunhui, specializes in fanless cases that help create completely silent PCs. Prior to the RTX 3080, Mical had already experimented with an RTX 2070 also on a fanless chassis and managed to maintain stable temperatures for the CPU and the GPU. Turemetal's chassis have become well-known among people who are interested in obtaining silent computers.

This time, Mical's experiment was considerably more unstable as it involved a much more potent graphics card that can be employed for 4K and VR. Because of the high performance of the NVIDIA RTX 3080, it can be found on some great gaming laptops including some Asus ROG. However, this graphics card has become increasingly hard to find in stores and its price has become significantly higher than the original $699 it was sold for upon release.

The RTX 3080 setup running without a fan was posted on Twitter by Mical himself who showed the graphics card running at 410W. Even though it is a great achievement to have such a powerful component running without fans, most Twitter users were quick to point out that the set-up is unstable as the GPU reached 87°C (188.6°F). It was also noted that Mical ran the test in a room with lower temperatures of 13.6°C (56.48°F) which likely affected the results which means that the same set-up could have reached even higher temperatures on normal conditions.

Even though Mical's experiment does not seem to be a good idea for many people who are actually interested in running a silent computer with an NVIDIA RTX 3080, it was definitely an interesting experiment. Even though silent PCs are still a niche interest, many gamers and PC enthusiasts were curious to see Turemetal's developments about how much a fanless chassis can withstand.

Turemetal's passive cooling experiment is definitely interesting,but  many would consider such a set-up unnecessary. There can be more effective methods to cool a powerful graphics card such as the RTX 3080 without using a fan. For instance, Gigabyte released a water cooling system for NVIDIA's graphics card. Because of the high price of a graphics card such as the RTX 3080 and a Turemetal chassis, it seems like a set-up like this is only useful for experimenting.

Nvidia's latest and greatest in graphics technology, the RTX 3000 series cards released last year to great reviews. As expected, this generation of cards has provided significant gains to the ray-tracing experience to users, which is considered to be the bleeding edge of PC/Console graphics.

While the cards may be the best gaming-oriented Nvidia GPUs that money can buy, the hardware shortages have seemed to hit consumers hard, especially those who were waiting out on their release for an upgrade. That being said, the still unreleased RTX 3080Ti seems to have been hit the worst by the shortages.