Summary of Cutting an NVIDIA RTX 4090 in Half with a Water Jet: The Science of Cooling

00:00:00 - 00:25:00

This video demonstrates how to cut an NVIDIA RTX 4090 in half using a water jet, in order to better understand the cooling process. The video also provides an introduction to vapor chambers and heat pipes, and discusses the different factors that can affect thermal performance.

• 00:00:00 In this video, a water jet is used to cut a cooler from an Nvidia RTX 4090 in half. The cooler originally came from one of these vapor chambers, which are designed to cool video cards by using fans to expel hot air. The interview with Malcolm Gutenberg, thermal engineer at Nvidia, covers the science behind fan design and thermal engineering. Topics covered include fan pressure, fan diameter, RPM, and pressure vs. damage. Squarespace is featured as the sponsor, and gamersnexus.com gets 10% off their first purchase with Squarespace.
• 00:05:00 This video explains how to cut an NVIDIA RTX 4090 in half with a water jet. The cooling process is explained, and different factors that can affect thermal performance are discussed. The video also provides a brief introduction to vapor chambers and heat pipes.
• 00:10:00 This video cuts an NVIDIA RTX 4090 in half using a water jet. The video explains that the design of the the card is different because it has copper pillars inside the vapor chamber to avoid it from drying out.
• 00:15:00 In this video, a water jet is used to cut an NVIDIA RTX 4090 in half. The goal is to make sure that the pressure on the die is very uniform, in order to achieve the best temperature performance. The notched pedestal on the North and East sides, the west and south sides, helps to achieve this. The temperature sensors show that the North side is 5-10 degrees hotter than the South side, as a result of non-uniform contact. The PTM 7900 thermal resistance controller is used to maintain the Vapor space at an isothermal state. The fans are used to ensure that the airflow is evenly distributed across the card, in order to prevent hotspots.
• 00:20:00 The video discusses how the design of NVIDIA RTX 4090 fans is different than previous generations and how the fans are able to achieve better thermals at a given noise level.
• 00:25:00 In this video, Malcolm Webster cuts an NVIDIA RTX 4090 card in half using a water jet. The results show that cooling with a fan can be simulated using computational power, and that acoustic levels can be used to determine if a fan is necessary.