Hello, I have the card in the picture below. I believe the brand is leadtek. The card works fine and I have no problems with it. Recently I finally upgraded from a 1080p to a 4k display and when I run many games at this resolution, the cooler fan is extremely loud. What are my options for cooling this thing a bit more quietly? I am not after extreme silence, some moderate fan noise is okay by me, I just don’t enjoy games while the vacuum cleaner is running, essentially.
Clean your nasty ass computer.
Or something like the Alphacool Eiswolf though you’d probably have to switch the rad to something smaller to fit your case.
But tbh for the price it would cost to go through all this you could probably just buy a different card with a better cooler on it.
Your best bet is probably to just go on ebay and buy someone else’s broken card and swap the coolers since other brands tend to have more substantial heat sinks.
Get a less restrictive case, the hot air is not being replaced fast enough.
Perhaps, but it runs just as fast and loud when the side of the case is open. Also, they aren’t seen in the picture, but there are two fans on the front below the drive bays that are moving air pretty well …
Ist the front of your case open enough to let fresh air in? Otherwise those fans are just moving around the hot air.
You can do some undervolting and/or reduce the power target. Additionally try to set a custom fan curve.
If all this doesn’t work good enough, you could try to find an alternative cooler which is quite hard nowadays.
Tiny fans are whiny and loud. All your fans are tiny. Your case looks way too restrictive for a 3070, which means all your fans are spinning up to account for this. I would replace the case and fans before trying to mod your graphics card. . After you’ve done that you might be able to buy a faulty/for parts 3070 and re-purpose the cooling components. I would definitely do more research on this beforehand though.
Build a new computer honestly.
Buy a cheapish case, 50 bucks, that allows for actual airflow. Buy some cheap fans, some P12s would be cjeap/effective.
Buy a motherboard that’s not 10+ years old. Buy a power supply that’s not some SFF oem proprietary garbage. clean your filthy pc out I can see the gunk build up in the gpu.
idk, I mean yeah its a repurposed workstation and there are limitations in terms of non-standard parts and the fact that it’s old. but on the other hand those are solid rigs with good build quality. It looks like it’s probably a HP Z640 or something. Plenty of decent xeon cpu’s for that 2011 socket on the used market for dirt cheap. Like just slap an E5 1650 v2 or v3 in there, 6c 12t and boosts to 3.8 ghz, not gonna top the charts but it’d be aight. Oh and those PSU’s are pretty good, depending on the model it could have a 700w 90% efficiency unit. Sometimes you gotta make the best out of what you have to work with.
But I’m not totally disagreeing with you either, it’s diminishing returns upgrading an old machine like OP’s vs a budget build with current or last gen hardware. like maybe a ryzen 5000 series to start with.
I guess the first question are you sure it’s the GPU fan and not the PSU or anything else spinning up to support the additional work the GPU is doing? If so and it is the GPU fan, there’s likely nothing simple you can do. The comment to reducing the GPU power by tweaking it’s power settings is probably the only easy option. But it likely will also reduce your gaming performance which might not be desirable if you’re trying to do 4K gaming.
While addressing your case airflow and other components is definitely recommended, it seems likely it’s more related to the GPU itself. Better airflow will help but it sounds like the GPU is pushing the limit of the included cooler so even better airflow probably won’t be enough to keep it from cranking the fan up. I feel like this is the standard complaint on blower style coolers. The fact they exhaust the heat out the back is helpful at reducing the heat in the case meaning you can get by with less case airflow, they also tend to be noisy especially when the GPU is dumping a lot of heat out. A better GPU cooler is likely the only real solution. But 3rd party ones aren’t cheap and of course you could mess up and kill your GPU if you’re not careful. A GPU that comes with a better cooler would be best. But again, a “better” GPU cooler is also likely going to dump more heat into the case which brings us back to your less then ideal case airflow setup.
Thanks all for the thoughts. Air flow was not the problem. The computer does not look all that nice, but there is a decent fan in the front behind that plastic bracket at the lower right of the picture. I did remove a couple of rather minor dust cakes inside the card, but there really was not much to speak of. I don’t think it was restricting air.
I did reapply what little thermal grease I had on hand though. I only had enough for a super thin layer all around. I reused the the thermal pads. Either the old grease dried out (probably) or just the act of disassembling and reassembling the card allowed for better thermal contact. I am going to disassemble and do it again the right way once I get a new tube of paste and some padding.
It is running much quieter now.
I’d reccomend finding a fan/fin/shroud assembly on eBay from a 3070 that someone has pulled off of their GPU to replace with liquid cooking. They’re very common for 3080 and 3090 cards but haven’t searched any for 3070s. They may be harder to find but if you can score one, should work much better than what you currently have as long as it’s a 3070 with the same VRAM config.
If that doesn’t work, this might be an even better option from NZXT.
https://nzxt.com/product/kraken-g12
With this.
That nzxt product is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking on. It looks like plenty have modded it slightly to work with 3000 series nvidia cards, and it is relatively inexpensive.
I actually managed to quiet down my card by essentially replacing the thermal paste. I did cut away some metal on the case that acts as a divider between the two card slots, increasing air flow. I am not sure which of these contributed more to the overall success, and while I can still technically hear the fan when pushing the card, it is hardly noticeable, even with no audio playing. I think I am happy with it.
That said, I am glad I created this thread. There are lots of good product recommendations, and I may move on to water cooling at some point.
When was the last time you changed thermal paste on the gpu?
Lol. That did it. This thing is much quieter now! Thanks.