Quote Originally Posted by ~CS~ View Post
Well why are those intakes are there then ? those cant be exhausts , air haven't pass trough any hardware to be exhausted , if inlet is closed fan is not going to be starved for air ,vacuum will develop and thus sucking air from the intakes , take all of this with grain of salt i have no education in aerodynamics just applying some common sense here .
I'm sorry but that's not how it works. Plug the intake of a turbo, does it start pulling air in from the outlet? No, it simply hits the choke point. It's the same for this type of fan - they operate on the same physical principle. They could be intakes if they are ducted to the inlet side of the fan, but just having two holes there would make them outlets.

There are lots of reasons they would put exhausts there. One of the major complaints about the last gen was the noise of the fan and the heat. Having a solid shroud on that side of the fan might create a dead spot. If they made openings there they may be able to gain some extra flow from the fan without spinning it any faster. And the VRM heatsink or heatpipe could easily be close enough for air to flow over it on the way out of those vents - though you can't really see anything like that from the leaked pics. It sounds, to me, like ATI changed the design to satisfy the heat/noise whiners only to piss off the "heat dump into my case" whiners, LOL.