Abit has a reputation for designing original products, and regularly surprises us with the quality of its innovations. That's the case we've been presented with again with the arrival of the Siluro OTES Ti4200 graphics card.

OTES stands for "Outside Thermal Exhaust System", and is a concise description of the very interesting new cooling system that comes equipped on the Siluro OTES.

In this case, a thermal collector has been

mounted on the surface of the GPU; what is essentially a heat pipe filled with liquid refrigerant. This liquid circulates through the unit, collecting heat, until it reaches its boiling point. Once that transition takes place, the vapor rises to a cooling-unit which extracts the excess heat, thus condensing the vapor back into a liquid, which recirculates in the heat pipes -- thus closing the continuous cycle.

On top of the thermal capture device is mounted a 7200rpm blower -- not the fan that one might be expecting. What's the difference, you may ask? It's very simple, and can be summed up in one word, "Efficiency". A fan uses spinning blades to speed-up the displacement of air, while a blower uses a specially designed cage interspersed with shutters that permit air to be concentrated at a point at the edge of the cage. Once said cage starts spinning, the shutters capture air, which is forced into the center and forced out to the exterior by accumulating pressure. Because the number of shutters in a blower can be much higher than the number of blades in a fan, there is a corresponding increase in the amount of air that can be moved, and thus a higher level of efficiency can be obtained. In industrial applications, blowers are much more commonly used than fans, due simply to the fact that can attain those higher efficiency levels in a smaller package.

So, getting back to the Siluro OTES Ti4200's cooling system, what we have is the Siluro's blower is mounted on top of the thermal capture unit, with the air-stream oriented to pass through the fins of the heat pipe cooler.

This highly effective system allowed designers to obtain operating temperatures 10 degrees lower than those of cards using more traditional cooling designs.