Are we going to see a general move to triple-slot coolers?

Q

Quartz-1

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Triple-slot coolers have been around at the very high end for a while on cards like the Ares and assorted 7990s. I wonder if we're going to see them come in at the normal high end - the R9 290 and 780 - this generation and then perhaps be regularised for the next?

I'd have no objection - indeed given the large heatsinks used with CPUs that have a far lower TDP, I'm surprised manufacturers have not already done so.
 
I doubt it. I think the niche will get bigger, but two slot coolers can be pretty decent and once you go 3 slots you have limited yourself on many builds. No more SLI/xfire in micro atx. No 4 way SLI/xfire with triple-slot GPUs. Even on normal ATX boards if you have two triple-slot video cards you have very few slots left for other cards. I think there will be plenty of triple-slot cards available, but the majority will still be dual-slot.
 
Most people dont have any add in cards besides a video card anyway. I personally wouldnt mind if there was triple slot coolers because running one video card at 1080p (what Im sure most game at) is perfectly acceptable.
 
I have a PCI-E sound card and 802.11n card. With two GTX580s I'm out of physical space as it is, so I kind of hope not.
 
I'd be surprised if triple-slotters became the norm anytime soon. Quality dual-slot coolers are more than capable these days (you don't fall in this category, AMD reference coolers!).
 
Direfox said:
I doubt it. I think the niche will get bigger, but two slot coolers can be pretty decent and once you go 3 slots you have limited yourself on many builds. No more SLI/xfire in micro atx. No 4 way SLI/xfire with triple-slot GPUs.
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But really, how large a market sector is that? And aren't those interested in such rigs likely to go for fluid cooling?

Even on normal ATX boards if you have two triple-slot video cards you have very few slots left for other cards.
Click to expand...

But would that actually matter? How many slots do people actually use? I'm looking at my PC and apart from the GPU I've got some USB plates, and that's it. And I wouldn't have those if the case had the ports instead. Some people might have a sound card, but what else would someone have in a gaming-oriented box?
 
I agree with Direfox. I wouldn't mind having that for a regular ATX build, but it seems there's a lot of interest in smaller builds these days and the interest seems to be increasing (I built a mini-ITX recently as well).
Triple slot coolers would be cut off in this segment, but more manufacturers could easily offer up a 2-slot or 3-slot cooler option; I wonder how much market share cards like Asus DCU II have...
 
Power requirements would need to keep rising to need 3 slot coolers.
If anything, power requirements will have to drop as die shrinks are making the die surface too small to get the heat out of them.
The amount of metal attached to the core wont help if the flow of heat away cant be improved substantially.

Dual GPU power cards are the exception, a 600W specced cooler will be needed for an overclocked dual 290x lol.
 
Seems to be the opposite trend to me, people even in the high end seem to be migrating to smaller form factors. For my next build I am going micro atx with sound dampening. The days of glowing full tower cases seem to be going the way of the dodo.
 
I love my 3 slot cooler, it's silent.

But on the other hand, it's 3 slot because there's a lot of heat to be dump out.

Personally I hope we'll see better efficiency in the future. Fancy as these coolers may be, those heat has to go somewhere, and they are wasted energy.

My next upgrade I'm waiting for when hardware is sufficiently advanced enough that I do not need to overclock these hardware to achieve better performance than what I have now. I certainly hope I can get away without requiring fancy oversized cooler.
 
I may be in the minority here, but dual slot coolers are hard enough to swallow. I wish a new MOBO standard would come out to remedy this as they aren't going away anytime soon. It really does limit what you can do when running multiple GPU's in a system and suddenly you find only one PCIe 1x slot in your system instead of 3.
 
Hehe yeah, there were some good animated gifs of alternative uses.
 
Hmm, compiling a table for the theoretical 2 slot cooling limit vs a 3 slot cooling limit at a given decibel level would be interesting.

But at this point, I'd like the video cards to have a real single slot option without stacking any ports for real single slot watercooling options. I'm seeing more and more people Modding their cards by removing the stacked DVI port. It's really quite nice.
 
I love the look of the old Nvidia 7800 single-slot coolers. There was just something so streamlined about them. Back then, single-slot was the norm and dual-slot cards were looked at like 'wtf, where do I put my sound card!?'. AIB manufacturers had to engineer the hell out of the cooling solutions on high-end cards to get them to fit the single-slot profile, and it showed. Modern dual-slot coolers look pretty cheap by comparison, Titan and 690 coolers aside.
 
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