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.
From the measurements, it’s clear that with a pair of Noctua fans, the noise reduction isn’t dramatic. It’s an improvement, but a drop of 2–3 dBA measured 20 cm from the card is unlikely to be worth the roughly 60 EUR investment in premium fans for most people.
It’s a different matter if one of the original fans fails. While it’s hard to break a blade on an impeller with a closed-rim design (even if you accidentally touch it while spinning), dust can still get in, fan startup can become unreliable, or bearing wear can make them noisier. In that case, replacement makes sense—and it’s good to know you can swap the originals for something better without much trouble.
The downside of replacing them with standard 25 mm-thick fans is that the card becomes significantly taller, and removing the shroud reduces structural rigidity. The PCB still provides some stiffness, but without the shroud braced against the I/O bracket, the card doesn’t resist sag as well. This makes it doubly important to support the far end of a heavy card or secure it to the case somehow.
There’s one more pitfall if you’re controlling the fans externally via software like FanControl—you must ensure that the control software runs and adjusts fan speed according to the GPU temperature. If you don’t, the GPU core will hit its thermal limit and start throttling performance and clocks significantly (don’t ask how I know—but for the TUF RTX 5070 Ti, that limit is around 88 °C).
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