Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Deshroud With Arctic P12 Pro A-RGB

Asus cards such as the Prime GeForce RTX 5070 allow easy removal of the shroud with the fans, without removing the heatsink itself. This opens room for experimentation with cooling.We will find out how much you can gain by replacing stock fans with a pair of 120mm Arctic P12 Pro A-RGB fans. We will measure operating characteristics from 20 to 100% fan speed and see how much the card’s noise level drops at identical temperatures.

Before we focus on the results with the Noctua fans, let’s look at the behavior of the card with the original fans. In the first graph, you can see how the card performed in terms of noise with the supplied fans. The card’s control allows you to set their output in the range of 30–100%. This corresponds to an operating range of 700–3200 rpm. Because one of the fans was clicking, the noise level of the cooler was 32.1 dBA even at the low 700 rpm. This increased the noise of the card across the entire speed range.

The next graph shows the noise level with a pair of Arctic P12 Pro A-RGB fans.

At lower speeds, the noise curve is flat. The reason is that the fan noise is below the measuring range of the sound level meter (30 dBA). At low speeds, the fans are almost inaudible and the intrinsic noise of the sound level meter is higher than the noise of the fans

How the operating characteristics of the card change will be measured across the entire range of fan performance. For time reasons, I will use short loops of the Cyberpunk benchmark with the RT Medium profile and a resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels with DLAA.

Before the whole batch, one warm-up loop runs with three passes and fan output set to 40%. This is not visible in the graphs below; they start with the first measurement with fans set to 100% output. Fan performance then gradually decreases in 5% steps from 100 to the lower limit of the measured range. With the card using factory fans, this ends at 30%, which corresponds to the minimum adjustable value. With cards with replaced fans, it ends at 20% output. Testing at 15 and 10% usually does not make sense, because at low fan speeds and GPU temperatures above 85 °C, regulation already starts to significantly throttle GPU power and with it clocks and performance, and noise can no longer be measured with the sound level meter used.

With each setting, three test loops are run. Between individual test runs, delays are only a few seconds, so the system remains warmed up during testing. Measured values will be read from the third loop, exceptionally from another one if there is some problem with the last measurement.

Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 (stock, 3× Axial-tech fan)

In this chapter, we will go through how the card behaved across the entire fan performance range. First, these will be simple graphs showing the entire test run, where everything is visible together. Specific measured values for each setting can be found in the interactive graphs in the following chapter.

At the lower limit of the tested range, that is at 30% fan output, the maximum GPU temperature was 85.2 °C and the average was 84.0 °C. At maximum speeds, the average temperature dropped to 59.2 °C.

The next graph shows fan speeds in the light blue data series. The fans were connected directly to the card, but their speeds were set manually using the Fan Control application.

At the lower limit, at 30% output, they start at around 700 rpm; at 100% output they run at 3200 rpm.

The purple curve in the graph shows the set fan output. The light blue values correspond to the current fan speed on the Fan 1 connector.

At minimum speeds, when the GPU temperature goes over 85 °C, power throttling of the chip occurs, clocks are reduced, and with that performance drops.

The next graph shows temperatures (in red) and total CPU utilization (in blue). As fan output on the card decreases, airflow in the case slows down, and CPU temperature rises slightly.

Performance differences do not change dramatically. With a cooler chip, clocks rise slightly and with them performance, but the difference increases only by tenths of frames per second.

This is more visible on GPU clocks than on performance. Toward the end, at low fan speeds, the card began to overheat; here you can see more significant drops in clock speeds. Between 30% and 100% fan output, the difference is roughly 100 MHz.

For reference, we also have graphs of power consumption for the entire system and for the card itself, according to what monitoring reports. In the first run, when chip temperatures were already too high, it is visible that GPU Boost also throttled the card’s performance. In subsequent runs, the card is clearly operating at the limits of its power budget.

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