HX Cooler Kit - 3 GPU - 120 mm PWM Fan Manifold for CMP 170HX / A100

A datacenter GPU has no fan of its own

Every passive accelerator — the CMP 170HX, the A100, the whole Tesla line before them — ships as a bare finned heatsink with no fan attached. In a rack that is deliberate: a 2U chassis puts a wall of 15,000 RPM fans in front of the cards and forces air down their length. Drop the same card into a desktop tower and there is no such wall. Case airflow drifts past the heatsink instead of through it, the card heat-soaks within minutes, and you watch it clock down to nothing — or trip thermal shutdown.

This kit supplies the missing half of the design. A 120 mm fan is sealed into a manifold that mates to the intake face of the heatsink, so every litre the fan moves is forced through the fins and out the back of the card rather than around it. It is the same principle as the server shroud, sized for three cards side by side on a desktop board.

What you get

• The manifold — a sealed plenum sized for three cards side by side, mating to the heatsink intake face.
• 1 × 120 mm PWM fan — 1,000–6,000 RPM, 2.7 A, 4-pin PWM control.
• 3 × PCIe-to-EPS converters — one per card, so nothing else is needed to power the GPUs.
• Mounting hardware for the fan-to-manifold and manifold-to-card interfaces.

Running the fan higher on a wide plenum

Three heatsinks in one plenum is the point at which fan speed starts to matter. The wider the duct, the more the fan is working against combined fin resistance rather than open air — which is precisely why this kit uses a fan that reaches 6,000 RPM instead of a quiet 1,800 RPM case fan. Expect to sit higher on the curve than a single-card build, roughly the 2,500–3,500 RPM band under sustained three-card load.

Why the card needs a converter, not just a cable

Datacenter cards take power through an 8-pin EPS inlet at the end of the card — the CPU-style connector, not the graphics-card one. It is the single most common way people destroy one of these on the first boot: an EPS 8-pin and a PCIe 8-pin look alike, and in the wrong hands one will go into the other.

They are not the same. A PCIe 8-pin carries three 12 V lines and five grounds; an EPS 8-pin carries four and four, in a different arrangement. Cross them and you feed 12 V into a ground pin. The converters in this kit remap the pins correctly and take their feed from your PSU's PCIe cables, which every desktop supply has spare.

6,000 RPM is the ceiling, not the setting

The fan in this kit is an industrial-grade unit with a very wide range: it will idle near 1,000 RPM and it will pull 2.7 A flat out at 6,000. At the top of that range it is genuinely loud — this is server-class air movement and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The point of the 4-pin PWM control is that you decide where on that range you live. Put the fan on a curve tied to GPU temperature: it will idle quietly when the cards are idle and only climb when you are actually loading all three. The headroom is there for the days you saturate every card at once, or for a warm summer with no air conditioning.

Which cards this fits

The manifold is cut for the standard NVIDIA full-height, full-length, dual-slot passive body — the 267 mm card with a finned tunnel running its whole length and the 8-pin EPS inlet at the far end. That covers CMP 170HX, A100 PCIe, A30, A40, L40, V100, P100 and P40, and the AMD Instinct cards of the same generation share the geometry closely enough to work.

Technical data

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