The card's fan continues to be mounted offset of the graphics core for greater efficiency and longer life, although now the fan is mounted lower than the rest of the body of the heatsink. In addition, the fan is tilted at an angle away from the GPU towards the power circuitry on the right edge of the PCB of the graphics board. Hot air from the card's fan is still exhausted outside the case.
So why did NVIDIA's engineers decide to indent and tilt the fan? Our guess is that this change was made to improve airflow when two cards are combined together for SLI. As we've mentioned numerous times in the past, with conventional SLI cooling setups, the uppermost card runs hotter than the bottom card. This is because airflow going into the top card is restricted by the card directly beneath it. By shifting the fan so that it's mounted lower on the board, NVIDIA manages to squeeze a few extra millimeters for the card's fan to draw in more air, and thus help keep temps lower. Another change you'll notice is that the shroud runs the entire length of the board and isn't enclosed on the right side, this allows air from the fan to run over the capacitors and other VRM on the right edge of the board. On previous GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX cards these components weren't actively cooled by the GPU fan.