XFX's new Magnetic Air graphics cards let you hot-swap fans, solving the plague of fan hub axle separation

Have you ever wanted to throw a cooling fan at a graphics card and watch it magically snap into place? Do you dream of solving the curse of fan hub axle separation that has «plagued traditional GPUs»? Fancy the idea of being able to attach 3 kg worth of fans to a graphics card? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then you'll be pleased to know that XFX's new Magnetic Air range of Radeon graphics cards lets you do all of these.

We had suspected that something like this was coming our way, from the teaser video that XFX had posted last week. But now the full details have been released and we can confirm our guess was correct: hot-swappable cooling fans. Specifically, these are magnetically attached to the hub and use a series of circular traces in the hub and metal pins in the fab, to transmit power and PWM data.

According to XFX, not only do these fans have «improved longevity» and «stable performance for the entire life of the fan», but they also make «fan hub axle separation a thing of the past»—something that has apparently «plagued traditional GPUs.» I'm clearly well out of the loop here as it's not something that I've ever experienced in a graphics card.

Come to think of it, I've not once had to replace a cooling fan for a GPU because it's failed. I've cleaned and lubed some in the past, to reduce how much noise they make, and I changed entire systems for better thermal performance, but never a renegade fan or three.

Cheap, nasty fans do just fall off the axle once they've worn away over time but has this really been a plague? If it was then something would have been done about it by now, so there's a fair degree of hyperbole to that statement. That's not to say XFX's system is without merit, as it could well be a much better setup than what one normally gets on a graphics card. Without independent testing, though, you'll just have to take XFX's word on the benefits.

The new Magnetic Air fans have been applied to three RDNA 3-powered Radeon graphics