MSI GeForce RTX 4090 With A Blower-Style Cooler Breaks Cover
MSI has quietly launched a brand-new GeForce RTX 4090 in China, but it's not your typical RTX 4090 graphics card. This latest MSI model, the Aero S is a blower-style cooler designed aimed at workstation users that is more compact than standard 4090 designs.
The card itself is about as simple as it gets for a 4090, the shroud is covered in a clean matte black finish that isn’t overrun with fancy RGB lighting or decals. When looking at the card straight on, all you see is a black shroud paired with a blower-style fan and that’s it – even the MSI logo is absent. The card’s dimensions are also quite small, measuring just 2 slots in thickness and a height that is just a hair taller than the PCIe bracket.
We don’t have any official advertising or specifications on this blower-style 4090, but based on the card’s look, it's obvious it wasn’t designed for gamers. MSI designed this card for the workstation market, where functionality is more important than aesthetics. For workstations or servers, blower-style coolers are preferred over axial cooler designs. These allow multiple GPUs to be housed inside a single system, or be housed inside slim rack-mounted server chassis where larger GPUs cannot fit. Blower style coolers often run louder than axial designs, but that isn't a concern when the system is squirreled away in a data center or server room.
RTX 4090’s like MSI’s Aero S are used by professionals as a way to circumvent NVIDIA’s more expensive Quadro/A-series workstation-focused graphics cards without losing much performance. As long as users don’t require high amounts of video memory, ISV certifications, or enhanced stability, the RTX 4090’s 18,176 CUDA cores and 24GB of VRAM provide a lot of processing power for AI development, simulation, and other high-performance applications.
Either way, the unfortunate news is that this card won’t be available to buy worldwide but will be limited exclusively to China. Hopefully, MSI brings this card to other countries one day, but we won't be holding our breath.
