After testing the low-profile Noctua NF-A12x15 fans, we moved on to another appealing alternative for replacing the stock fans on the Asus TUF GeForce RTX 5070 Ti—a set of three Arctic P12 Slim fans, which you might already know from HWCooling tests. While they don’t outperform Asus’s original solution, which is tailor-made for the heatsink, they deliver slightly better results than the Noctua low-profile fans—and at a much lower price.
For high-performance cards with high power draw, manufacturers struggle the most with cooler dimensions, especially their height. That’s the main limitation. The form factor of motherboards was created at a time when nobody really cared about how expansion cards would be cooled, because PCs didn’t use add-in cards with 500 W power consumption.
For quiet cooling of such monsters, a large finned surface and sufficient airflow to blow through it are essential. But that conflicts with the limited space in cases and on the motherboard for expansion cards. To make the heatsink as tall as possible while keeping the overall height acceptable, manufacturers usually opt for tall fin stacks combined with low-profile fans.
If you want to replace the low-profile fans that come with the card with something commonly available, you’ll find that most PC fans are 25 mm thick. With those, a triple-slot card becomes a four-slot card. The alternative is low-profile fans, but the selection isn’t exactly wide. Last time, we looked at what happens when you swap the stock fans for Noctua NF-A12x15.
Today we’ll see how things turn out with low-profile fans that offer higher static pressure and airflow at similar noise levels—the Arctic P12 Slim.
The Arctic P12 Slim fans target the upper mid-range segment. They’re not the cheapest 120 mm fans, but the price premium is small, and they’re significantly more affordable than the Noctua we tested last time. Prices start at around 7 EUR. A nice bonus is that you can get a triple-pack for about 16 EUR, which is ideal for our scenario.
As before, we’ll mount three of them on the card. A big advantage here is that these are PWM fans with the PST suffix—meaning they come with a splitter at the end, so you can daisy-chain more fans. The PWM signal is duplicated from the first fan to the next ones, so all fans on the same chain run at similar speeds.
The accessories include twelve UNC 6-32 screws, typically used for mounting to radiators, and twelve standard self-tapping fan screws.
When you line up three 120 mm fans, they’ll already be a few centimeters longer than the card itself. You can’t mount them all directly to the heatsink, so I modeled a frame to hold them. The rear fan is already partly blowing past the card.
It’s just a simple supporting structure for the fans, which is somewhat modular. We’ll use this to compare cooler performance with side skirts attached—to prevent air from escaping too soon – and with exposed fins.
The fans will again be connected to a Corsair Commander Pro controller. We’ll adjust the fan curve so that the GPU core reaches similar temperatures as in previous tests, and then compare what speeds are needed to achieve those temps and how loud the cooler will be in the process.
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I don’t understand this statement: “Standard fans, which are generally designed for system airflow rather than large heatsinks with dense fin stacks, simply don’t perform as well.”
Then, a configuration of 2x NF-A12x25 is shown to beat the default fans.
You’re right—the wording should have said “typical slim-profile case fans,” not “standard fans”. Those are built for general case airflow, not for pushing air through tight, dense fin stacks. Dense heatsinks need higher static pressure, which is why the stock Axial-tech fans—designed for this—do better than slim case fans.
A pair of NF-A12x25s is a different story. They’re full-height 25 mm fans with much higher static pressure, so on the same heatsink they can beat the stock fans at similar temperatures. There’s no contradiction: the warning was about slim case fans, while the other test used pressure-optimized 25 mm fans.
In a later test, I also compared an Arctic P12 to the smaller-diameter Axial-tech fans on the Prime RTX 5070 (one of the three had rattling bearings). At roughly the same temperatures, even the P12 was quieter than those lower-quality individual units, so in this case it would make a suitable replacement.
https://www.hwcooling.net/en/asus-prime-geforce-rtx-5070-deshroud-with-dual-arctic-p12-slim/