A few days ago, I tested how repasting affects the thermals and noise of Asus’s TUF GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Today, we’ll take it a step further. We’ll take advantage of the fact that the card’s design allows easy removal of the shroud and and mount different fans directly onto the heatsink—in this case, a pair of Noctua’s classic NF-A12x25. We’ll measure how the noise profile changes while keeping temperatures under load the same.
Graphics cards from Asus’s TUF series are usually built so that you can unscrew the shroud with its fans without having to remove the heatsink from the GPU die. On top of that, they often come with an above-average-sized heatsink, making them attractive candidates for a deshroud—removing the original fan shroud and replacing the stock fans with quieter, larger, more powerful, and higher-quality ones. Swapping fans can change the noise level or acoustic character of the cooler, or replace fans that produce undesirable sounds.
We’ll try this on the same card I disassembled last week to replace the thermal paste. On GPU coolers, fans are usually mounted into the shroud. Once it’s removed, you need another way to secure the fans to the card.
The quickest and easiest method is to attach the fans directly to the heatsink using a twist tie—the kind you find on nearly every cable. More commonly, people use disposable nylon zip ties. Unless you have the special reusable type, they’re not very practical. If you need to undo them—say, to reposition a fan slightly—the small ones don’t open quickly, and most people don’t have the patience for it, so they just cut them off.
The ideal solution would be to design and make a new shroud to hold the fans. That would also restore the benefit of the original robust shroud, which is screwed to the I/O bracket and helps reduce sag, easing stress on the PCB. But designing a full shroud would take too long for a quick experiment, so I went for a compromise. I took advantage of the fact that the heatsink has a sturdy metal frame along its perimeter. I designed simple clips that slide into the heatsink fins and hook onto this frame.
The clips have holes for standard rubber vibration-damping fan mounts, the kind you can get on Aliexpress. These mounts not only reduce vibration transfer from the fans to the heatsink but also create a slight gap between the fans and the fins, which helps lower noise.
Compared to the prototypes shown above, the clips have had some minor tweaks—I curved the top surface—but the basic concept is unchanged. They’re printed from PETG on a Bambulab A1 using a standard 0.4 mm nozzle and a 0.15 mm layer height. With inexpensive PETG, each clip costs just a few cents.
For strength reasons, the parts are printed so that the clips are stressed along the layer lines. This means the small “tooth” ends don’t look perfectly clean, as they’re printed from breakaway supports in mid-air.
Width-wise, the heatsink is practically made for a deshroud with 120 mm fans—the fit is nearly perfect. The fins are also divided into two blocks. In length, however, it’s less ideal: too long for just two 120 mm fans and too short for three. The stock shroud with three fans makes the card 33 cm long, but with three 120 mm fans, you’d stretch it to 360 mm, and the rear quarter of the last fan would blow into empty space.
I had two spare first-generation Noctua NF-A12x25 fans on hand, so I tried a dual-fan setup. Since the rear fin block is slightly longer, I positioned the second fan to cover the widest section of the heatsink. Another option would be moving it closer to the card’s rear edge so more of the impeller blows through the cutout in the backplate.
Four-pin PWM fans can, with the right adapter, be connected directly to the card’s seven-pin header. The pins aren’t labeled on the card, but they are on the fans’ PCBs, so the wiring can be figured out with a multimeter. For now, I skipped that experiment and connected the fans to a Corsair Commander Pro controller, regulating them purely via software in FanControl.
Standard 120 mm fans are 25 mm thick, meaning the card becomes significantly taller than with the stock shroud, occupying four slots. You can seal the gap between the fans and the heatsink so airflow is forced directly into the fins, but it’s not essential.
I measured the temperature difference with the gaps sealed, and in this case, the change in operating characteristics was well within the margin of error.
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