This begs the issue of whether Nvidia would try to make liquid-cooling even more mainstream by incorporating it into the reference designs for its gaming-focused GPUs. The business makes no mention of such intentions, merely stating that it will “enable liquid cooling in our high-performance data centre GPUs” in the “foreseeable future.”
However, server technology is always trickling down to home PC innovation, and gaming cards with an all-in-one liquid cooler aren’t completely unheard of — AMD has had a few reference designs that incorporated a liquid-cooling loop, and third parties have previously produced liquid-cooled Nvidia cards. As Nvidia’s cards use more and more power (a stock 3090 Ti may draw up to 450 watts), I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia announced an RTX 5000-series card with a liquid cooler.
According to Nvidia, firms such as ASRock, Asus, and Supermicro will include liquid-cooled cards into their servers “later this year,” while slot-in PCIe A100 cards will be available in Q3 of this year. A liquid-cooled PCIe variant of the recently announced H100 card (the next-generation version of the A100) is scheduled for “early 2023.”
