Cooler Master is bringing back the blower-style GPU shroud with its new MasterFlow accessory. It's designed to sit atop of a graphics card and redirect the hot exhaust that is often pewed towards the CPU outside of the case instead.
If you've been building PCs for a little while now, you'll be familiar with the blower-style shroud. It used to be a mainstay of reference cards, such as Nvidia's GTX 10-series, but has been ditched in favour of more effective dual- or triple-fan setups, often with a heatsink exposed on both sides of the card.
Blower-style fans would push hot air outside of the case, via the expansion slots. Whereas modern GPU designs are more effective at cooling the GPU, they often send the hot air upwards towards the CPU, thus increasing temps. So Cooler Master had an idea:
"What we wanted to do is help to eliminate hot air from the GPU going into the CPU area," says Cooler Master representative Brett Buren at Cooler Master HQ in Taiwan.
"Obviously, with a lot of new GPUs, like 5080s and 5090s, they have a passage on the back of the GPU to let hot air escape. But the downside of that is that it interferes with the CPU."
"So with a simple blower fan attachment, we're able to isolate that hot air and get it out of the case before it interacts with anything."
The Master Flow rest atop of a graphics card, in what is often an unused expansion slot, and collects the hot exhaust air. A small radial fan inside blows the air towards the slot, and reportedly this offers a big benefit for CPU temps: around a four to six degree improvement.
I picked it up at the event and it has some adjustment for a range of GPU sizes—sliding back and forth for a range of lengths.
For now, Cooler Master is planning to use the MasterFlow in its own prebuilt systems. I'm hoping to see this one land on the shelves for consumers, however, as it feels like it could come in useful for systems running at the very edge of acceptable thermals.
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