Card Layout and Photos
The Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC is a triple fan card with a mix of silver and black for its styling. They have silver running along the top edge and also dropping down around the center fan. Then below that everything is black. The silver section has an angled overhand and the part that wraps around the center fan bulges out slightly. The black half has a matching section to that at the bottom as well. The Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC does stick up past the PCI bracket slightly, but only by 8mm making it a short card by today's standard. It is just under 50 mm thick making it a 2 ½ slot design. It is 300 mm long which is longer but not long by today's standards.
The triple fan layout has three 90mm wide fans. Each fan has 9 blades and is an axial design pushing down into the aluminum fin heatsink below them. The fans do have all of the blades linked together which gives them a little more strength and helps focus the air down into the card. But for any air that bleeds out, they do have the center fan spinning in the opposite direction to cut down the turbulence where those fans are close to each other.
Up on the top edge, a few things are going on. The backplate does wrap around in a few spots with one of those including the Radeon branding being printed on it in silver. Then in the center, the fan shroud has angled groves in it with the Nitro logo in the center. The top also has the power connections and AMD cards once again have kept things simple with the standard PCIe power plugs, for the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC you have two 8-pin plugs with both flipped around with the clip side notched into the PCB. This lets the heatsink stay tight up against the plugs when you don’t have to have room to get your finger down in there for the clip. The plugs themselves are 5 mm down below the top of the card, not completely recessed but it does help not to have them sticking completely up and out of the top.
Looking at the top and bottom edges as well as the end of the card gives us a better understanding of the cooler design. Both the top and bottom are mostly open air to allow for the air from the fans to vent out. The bottom view lets us see that the heatsink is split into three sections. They have the heat plate sitting over the GPU and VRAM and in that area, the heatpipes drop down for better contact. Then on both sides of that, there are gaps in the cooler where the heatpipes move up to be centered in the heatsink. The left side is a small section, most cards don’t split that apart and just keep it all combined with the section over top of the GPU, it feels like that might be losing more surface area than it's worth. On the right side, there is a long section that covers the end of the PCB and then drops down to be thicker in the blow-through section. At the top of the card and on the back you see the rear backplate is bent around, this gives that backplate a lot more strength and helps prevent the card from flexing. The end of the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC doesn’t have any ventilation, nor would it be needed with the horizontal layout of the heatsink. It does have two threaded holes for use with cases that have support brackets.
The back of the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC has a full-length aluminum backplate. It is cut around the support bracket behind the GPU and there is a second cutout up at the top for the two power connections. Then down at the end, after the PCB ends the blow-through section has a honeycomb design cutout for it to vent through. I like the honeycomb design, it gives that area as much support as possible but doesn’t blow airflow too much. The backplate is black with a brushed finish. Then Acer has given it a LOT of silver accent lines that radiate out from the GPU. The AMD Radeon branding is there as well and then they have their Nitro branding in the larger font. Both of those are upside down here so that they will be readable when installed in most cases.
For display connections, the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC has four in total. You get the standard layout with three DisplayPorts and one HDMI with the HDMI being down at the bottom of the PCI bracket. The bracket doesn’t have a tinted finish at all, it is just bare metal, and above the display connections, Acer did include horizontal and vertical slots for some extra ventilation. But the cooler itself isn’t pushing air in this direction.
