Zephyr, a Chinese manufacturer of custom NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, has shared some insights into the development of their “Sakura Snow X” GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16 GB model. Last week, a progress report was published via the company’s official Bilibili blog. A lone shot of this upcoming SFF-format gaming product shows a familiar shroud design—last year, TechPowerUp covered Zephyr’s similarly decorated “Sakura Snow X” GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB model. The NVIDIA board partner is nearing the finish line with their latest Mini-ITX project—they describe this new model being almost complete, due to it passing their own “35℃ constant temperature chamber test.”
The still-in-progress “Sakura Snow X” GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER candidate’s power consumption reached Team Green’s reference limit—the “full 285 W”—whilst meeting performance standards of the standard issue board design. Zephyr’s diminutive cooling solution consists of a single fan and a contained heatsink module. Engineers tried out two different fan speeds—3000 and 3800 RPM—combined with three finstack material options. “Under normal open conditions” they found that their pure copper module performed best, albeit with a driving up of costs. The graphene-coated aluminium module recorded similarly results-wise when compared to a bare aluminium subject. Zephyr noted that the black finish—on the graphene-augmented variant—gave off the appearance of being a higher-end product.
As expected, the 3800 RPM spin rate granted greater airflow; in turn lowering temperatures, but Zephyr picked up on a much higher noise level—commenting: “(it is) significantly higher (than the) 3000 RPM fan’s noise level, (which) is similar to the regular ‘Sakura Snow X’ model’s sound profile.” Uniko’s Hardware has weighed in—as an outsider observer—on the topic of Zephyr’s methodologies. They took umbrage with the manufacturer’s utilization of differing FurMark 2 release versions, and “stress test durations” being inconsistent across tests—the Hong Kong-based publication declared that Zephyr had performed an imperfect comparison. A quick survey is attached to Zephyr’s Bilibili blog entry—asking readers to select their preferred fan speed: 3800 RPM or 3000 RPM. One commenter cheekily asked about a potential successor’s release date. A highly-customized GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16 GB card is very likely some distance away from launch.