The Forbidden Noctua Swap

[Music] hi welcome back to a new video last week we were analyzing the asus x nok2r rtx 3070 which is a very very impressive card when it comes to like performance noise levels and everything there was also quite some confusion from my side when it comes to comparison of the noctua edition versus the 30-70 tough gaming and the 30-70 dual i finally also got my dual which i actually ordered like days before the 3017 octa edition arrived but it didn't make it in time but i got it now so we can still compare the 3070 dual cooler to the nokta cooler originally i thought this would also be the identical heatsink to the tough gaming which is also not the case the pcb is the same as far as i can tell i still didn't open the card but it should be the same pcb on all three cards but the cooler is different on all three cards but at least we can compare the coolers between the cards and we can also do a fan swap because a lot of people are also happy about that this is it's basically a normal fan shroud that can hold normal 120 millimeter fans and a lot of people requested what would happen if you just swap the brownish fans to some black tromax fans so i ordered these we can do fan swap we can do cooler swap compare some stuff and also now that noctua got back to me thank you very much for this information we can compare the tough gaming cooler to the noctua edition cooler today's video is supported by hadzner with the dedicated root server ax41 the experienced data center provider heads now offers its hosting products for private and business clients with data centers in germany and finland while offering the most recent and best technical standards hetzner also focuses on ecological use of hardware and runs 100 green electricity the ax41 is a brilliant entrance dedicated route server and comes by default with the six core amd ryzen 364 gigabyte memory and two 512 gigabyte nvme drives the entire rack design and also the cooling solutions are developed in-house at hadzner here in germany and with 24 7 support high-speed internet connection leaders protection and unlimited traffic find more in the link below first of all the comparison between the tough gaming heatsink and the noctua edition heatsink the issue is that when i compared the coolers just judging by pictures from online i only had the image from above and not from the side so it was not possible to compare the height but looking at the top right picture which is the tough gaming heatsink you can see it has a height of about 33 millimeter and looking at on the bottom right the noctua heatsink has a height of about 43 millimeters just the increase of about 10 millimeter in height will already drastically increase the heatsink surface area and that already just without any changes to the heat pipe placement would already be a good increasement in the surface area and leads to better performance but i also changed the heat pipe placement of the heatsink tough gaming has about 22 millimeter distance between heat pipes and the noctua cooler has 25.7 millimeter distance between the heat pipes on the heatsink so yeah that should in theory help to spread the heat more evenly on the heatsink which is also bigger and these are the changes that noctua helped asus with while the 3070 dual keeps heating up for our test to check the noise level we can take a closer look at the fan shroud again because i saw some confusion at least in some comments regarding the state of these fans those are really just a normal retail fans you can see there is a fan adapter inside here where you can see the the four pin cables so those are really just a normal four pin pwm fans from october and we can easily swap them to any other fans because there's nothing done to them like no modifications whatsoever about 15 minutes later quick comparison we can immediately spot that the gpu clock on the 30 70 duel is slightly higher about 40 to 50 megahertz which is also a result of using the q profile on the 3017 octa edition which means that it's clocking a little bit lower to keep the noise level lower but on the 30 70 dual already the gpu temperature is higher by about 60 degrees celsius and the fan speed is also higher closing into 2000 rpm on both fans and the power draw is roughly identical just subjectively talking this card is already quite a bit louder yeah and confirmed in our noise testing it's about 13 dba louder than the noctua edition here we have our nf f12 swap fans to swap them with the a12 fans but i also want to point out that even though we are swapping to black fans for this position right here the fan shout itself still has like a brownish tint to it and as i said before i'm actually a big fan of this design it just looks absolutely awesome it just it looks like it's a very high performant card and yeah not sure how good this will look with black fans but we will check it by the way we don't need these rubber feet i first thought those will help like noise tempering but then i figured out that the fan is in direct contact you can spot that like right here that the fan has direct contact to these feet right here and also due to the like sticky pad in between this will not usually have direct contact with the heatsink so i guess we can just not use them not even five minutes later fans are swapped i used an extension cord on the right fan which is included in the fan and for the left one i used just the short cable this actually needed or should be like three four millimeters longer than this would perfectly fit like right through here and then go to the fan hub but i guess this will work without any issues it looks quite all right i guess i personally also think that the original look suits it better because of the like brownish tint but yeah let's just check temperatures and noise levels it's definitely not bad and here we can also see that there's a small gap between the fan and the heatsink itself so comparing to the a12 fans that was just one db louder which for my setup is definitely measurement tolerance just to double check the temperature is about the same as what we had before with the noctua card the clock is slightly lower than on the dual card now comparing the f12 fans to the a12 fans this is an increased fan speed of about 30 to 40 rpm i would say on the f12 fans but that's still absolutely okay and the power draw still the same both a12 and f12 fans absolutely delivered when it comes to performance and noise levels something we absolutely wouldn't do obviously is swapping the fans to some weird rgb fans well as you can see these fans are also quiet looking at the data these could also be the f12 fence it's pretty much identical i mean if it's 10 rpm difference that could be measurement error anyway if we now compare our three different fans we use we can definitely see that the a12 the originally used fans from noctua are performing by far the best with about 33 dba and the two other fans the f12 and the corsair ml fans both have about 34 dba but i also have to point out for this type of setup i have this is definitely within measurement tolerance and just subjectively speaking i cannot tell a difference and even from this distance the card is still running on 100 fan load and like i cannot really hear anything apart from this light coil wine i can hear from the card but fan wise cannot hear anything and that also shows that the major advantage you have from getting this card is the heatsink that's also why i'm not going to swap the heatsink from the dual to the noctua edition because the pcb is the same and the major difference will be the ability to mount big fans which can definitely push more air through your heatsink and at the same time have a heatsink with a much bigger surface area that's the major advantage you have on the noctor card and it's a great card you can definitely get this one i'm not sure about the swapping fan thing if you really hated the brownish fans you can swap it with the f12 that would definitely work if that's a thing for you i wouldn't do it with like an rgb mod it just it just doesn't look nice but yeah performance wise it's still a very good card i just wish that noctua and asus would do it for different models and not just 30 70 but maybe also like 3080 ti 3090 ti if it ever makes it to the market i guess that would be quite awesome i was thinking about swapping the heatsink to like a 3080 380 ti whatever but first of all i don't have a card here and also the pcb layout of these cards like the high-end cards is different to the 30-70 that's why this probably wouldn't work all right thanks for tuning in until next time bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 143,376

Keywords:

Id: 44PEl57EJo4

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Site-Staff]

Easy swap fans are a godsend. I with more companies would embrace them.

[u/rerri]

There's no standard size for GPU fan.

The Asus/Noctua 3070 uses standard 25mm thick case fans. While these fans are good for cooling, they aren't used in GPUs because they make the card extremely thick which poses an issue for case compatibility. So don't expect 25mm thick case fans ever to become standard for graphics cards.

[u/madn3ss795]

Sapphire had easy swappable fans for a long time, turns out not enough people cared and their recent releases don't have that feature anymore.

[u/Vile35]

the VRM fans on motherboards should be ez swappable also.

[u/ticuxdvc]

So, when will the GPU become as modular as the motherboard?

Get a GPU motherboard from Asus/Gigabyte/etc, then socket in your preferred chip (Nvidia/AMD XXXX), then add your VRAM by getting VRAM sticks, then attach your fans.

[u/[deleted]]

My first GPU was a Riva TnT like 20 years ago...

Point is, after dozens of GPU cards after, I have never had a fan issue, once. Unless you want more RGB on their, what is the meaning for changing fans?

Aesthetics?

Better cooling?

Faulty fans?

Honest question.

[u/FakeSafeWord]

Would be interesting to 3d print some custom fans, as some people are doing, and getting better results than store bought fans.

Would have to be able to remove the actual fan part from the spindle though as well.

[u/melonenfan]

hell yea gime now Noctua is life Noctua is love

[u/Zurchules]

How about standardizing gpu heatsinks altogether? Agreeing on memory zones and non-interference areas and then just letting consumers buy their own shit. Seriously just put heatsinks on the vrm something like what you see on motherboards.

I'd much rather have a 5 slot, itx-length gpu cooled silently by an NH-D14 than have a 45 inch long 3080 only take up two slots but sound like a ww2 prop plane when I take my headphones off. Others may disagree, and they can get their own cooler.

Also letting case manufacturers offer bespoke cooling options for graphics cards that are optimized for the case seems like a great idea, and the people that want repurposed shipping containers for PCs can still buy mid and full tower cases.