Good news for those who don't like blower-style GPU coolers, AMD is discontinuing them with the next generation of Radeon graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture. Instead, AMD will switch to an axial fan cooling solution, as Nvidia did when it launched the GeForce RTX series and then the Turing-based GeForce GTX cards.

As far as GPU coolers are concerned, blowers have the advantage of being able to vent hot air directly out of the case, since the exhaust ports are located in the expansion slots. However, they generally speaking do not cool as well as axial fan solutions and are often noisier.

In the past, AMD has largely resisted switching to the same style of coolers that its hardware partners use in their own custom designs (although there have been exceptions). That is about to change.

AMD previewed a photo of the updated cooler design in one of the slides it showed during its Financial Analyst Day presentation on Wednesday.

It would have been easy to miss the thumbnail shot of the GPU cooler, especially since there were so many slides during the 3.5-hour presentation and AMD said nothing about it. However, the image was posted on Reddit, and Scott Herkelman, AMD's vice president and general manager of the Radeon business unit, confirmed the change.

"In the next generation of machines, there will be no more blower reference fans for gamers. That's right," Herkelman wrote, accompanied by a winky face. [This is not entirely new territory for AMD; the Radeon VII (Vega) has a triple axial fan cooler, but you'll have to go back a few generations to find another cooler. The Radeon RX 5000 series (Navi) and 500/400 series ( Polaris) exclusively used blower-style coolers in their reference models.

If the teaser images in the presentation slides are accurate, the next generation Radeon cards will be a two-fan cooling solution. The overall style appears similar to Nvidia's latest GeForce line, but there are limited tweaks that can be made before adopting something completely different, like Gigabyte's Windforce design for example.