ABIT only very recently started to supply some of their retail partners with the graphics cards that utilise their OTES cooling system, and today I was unofficially told that the company now prepares the OTES-2 solution to be used with the future products.

OTES stands for Outside Thermal Exhaust System and its main peculiarity is ability to blow the hot air outside the computer case. According to ABIT, such kind of cooling systems cools the GPU about 15% better compared to the rivals. The cooling system was unveiled just a couple of weeks ago and it is quite strange that ABIT decided to develop the second version of it. Nevertheless, I want to point out that after we first discussed the device in early September (see this news-story), we noted numerous disadvantages it may have. Let me remind them for you:

• OTES cools down only the graphics chip, but cannot cool down memory that heats pretty well on the GeForce3 and GeForce4 cards;
• The fan is spinning at 7200rpm, what is not going to be silent at all;
• Since VGA connector is maintained on an additional board, it is unlikely that the 2D quality will be excellent in high resolutions;
• The graphics card with OTES will not allow to install a PCI board in the nearest slot to AGP.

Since the shortcomings of the OTES can overweight its advantages, the company might have decided to develop another version that will be a bit better. I have no idea about what they are going to change, maybe they will try to cool memory down as well or make the system smaller, but one thing I am pretty sure is that OTES-2 may appear sometimes later this year.