HX Cooler Kit - 2 GPU - 120 mm PWM Fan Manifold for CMP 170HX / A100

2 GPU · 120 mm PWM · 2 EPS converters HX Cooler Kit — 2 GPU One manifold, two passive accelerators. A single 120 mm PWM fan feeds a plenum spanning both cards, so a dual-GPU desktop build needs one fan and one duct rather than two of everything. Ships with two PCIe-to-EPS converters — one per card. 2 GPUs Cards cooled 1× 120 mm PWM fan 6,000 RPM Peak fan speed 2 × EPS Power converters The problem 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 two cards side by side on a desktop board. Without ducting, a 250 W passive card in a tower is not a slow card — it is a card that works for four minutes and then stops being useful. Ducted, it holds full clocks indefinitely. In the box What you get The manifold — a sealed plenum sized for two 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. 2 × 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. Two cards, one fan Why the pair shares a plenum Spanning both cards from a single sealed plenum is not a cost compromise, it is the better arrangement. A shared plenum pressurises across the full width and pushes into whichever heatsink offers the least resistance, which is the hotter one. Two independent fans, by contrast, hold two independent pressure zones and cannot balance between them. Practically: on a two-card build one fan on a sensible curve is quieter than two fans doing the same work, because you are moving the same volume through twice the fin area. Power 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. Never adapt an EPS inlet with a plain re-pinned cable or a straight-through "8-pin to 8-pin" lead. Use a converter that is explicitly built for the direction you need. That is what ships here. Noise and control 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 almost never run it there. Put the fan on a curve tied to GPU temperature and a two-card build sits in the 2,000–3,000 RPM band during sustained inference. The headroom above that is there for the days you saturate both cards at once, or for a warm summer with no air conditioning. Check your fan header first. At full speed this fan draws up to 2.7 A — well beyond the ~1 A a typical motherboard chassis header is rated for. Feed the fan from the PSU (a hub with its own SATA or Molex input is the usual answer) and take only the PWM signal wire from the header. Ask us if you want the wiring spelled out for your board. Fitment 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. Two cards means two adjacent dual-slot positions. Check that your board's x16 slots are spaced to put the cards side by side without a gap — tell us the board and we will confirm the pitch works before you order. Specifications Technical data Cards supported 2 × full-height, full-length dual-slot passive accelerators Fan 1 × 120 mm, 1,000–6,000 RPM Fan current Up to 2.7 A at 12 V, per fan Fan control 4-pin PWM Power converters included 2 × PCIe to 8-pin EPS Card power inlet 8-pin EPS at the end of the card Verified cards CMP 170HX, A100 PCIe, A30, A40, L40, V100, P100 and P40 Price €65 ex VAT Questions FAQ Do I need this, or will good case airflow do?You need it. Case airflow moves air through the case; a passive accelerator needs air forced through a narrow finned tunnel against real static pressure. Those are different jobs. Builders who skip the duct report the card idling fine and then collapsing under the first sustained load — which is exactly the load you bought it for. Is one fan really enough for two cards?Yes, and it is the better arrangement — see the section above. A shared plenum balances pressure between the two heatsinks in a way two separate fans cannot. You will run it somewhat higher on the curve than a single-card build. Is it loud?At 6,000 RPM, yes. On a temperature-driven PWM curve during normal inference work it settles around 2,000–3,000 RPM. You control where on that range you live. Can I run the fan from a motherboard header?Take the PWM signal from the header, but not the power. At 2.7 A the fan exceeds what a standard chassis header is rated to deliver. Feed it from the PSU through a powered hub. What PSU do I need for two cards?Budget around 250 W per accelerator on top of the rest of the system, and make sure the supply has enough spare PCIe 8-pin outputs to feed both converters. A 1,000 W-class supply covers a typical two-card desktop build. Buying the cards too? We sell the CMP 170HX 64 GB and we build complete machines around these accelerators — see the AI Servers collection. Order the cooler alongside a card and it ships together.