Are you also tired of whiny and loud fans on low profile graphics cards? I've come up with a solution to keep the GPU both cool and quiet called deshrouding. In short, it means replacing the fans with both larger and thicker ones, whilst retaining the heatsink. These larger fans can spin a lot slower, making the GPU inaudible under load. A very welcome addition to a case you'll be putting in your living room or on your desk!

Yocto provides mounting points for two 60 mm fans under the GPU. Depending on the radiator size of your GPU, you can attach fans up to 25 mm thick to these points.

The sum of the fan thickness and the radiator height, starting from the PCB, can be no more than 48 mm. As a reference, I've made a table below with all the radiator dimensions of most of the popular low profile GPU's.

Advised fans

There aren't many quality 60 mm fans, but we're lucky that Noctua, one of the best fan manufacturers, has a great one. The NF-A6x25 PWM is probably the best fan you can get when deshrouding your GPU.

Controlling fan speed

GPU's tend to use different fan headers than regular case fans use. To control the fan speed based on the GPU temperature, you can buy an adapter. However, many cards define a high minimum fan speed on their header, so it is much easier and advised to use a fan header on your motherboard. You can then control the speed very precisely using software like Fan Control. You can find an in-depth guide to controlling fans based on GPU temperature with Fan Control here.

Note on the RTX A2000

The RTX A2000 is the strongest and most recent low profile GPU and a popular choice for the Yocto. But the blower style cooler makes it unsuitable for deshrouding. While it is a pretty quiet card, its minimum fan RPM can be annoying, so I came up with a custom heatsink solution that enables you to deshroud this card!

Supported graphics cards 

Card Radiator Fan
ASRock Intel Arc A310 21mm 25mm
ASRock Intel Arc A380 21mm 25mm
Asus GTX 1050 (ti) 21mm 25mm
Asus GTX 1650 21mm 25mm
Asus RTX 3050 6GB 21mm 25mm
EVGA GTX 1050 (ti) 36mm
Galax/KFA GTX 1050 (ti) 36mm
Galax/KFA GTX 1650 36mm
Galax/KFA RTX 3050 6GB 36mm
Gigabyte GTX 1050 (ti) 36mm
Gigabyte GTX 1650 20mm 25mm
Gigabyte RX 6400 20mm 25mm
Gigabyte RTX 3050 6GB 21mm 25mm
Gigabyte RTX 4060 21mm 25mm
Manli GTX 1650 23mm 25mm
MSI GTX 1050 ti 21mm 25mm
MSI GTX 1650 21mm 25mm
MSI RTX 3050 6GB 21mm 25mm
RTX A2000 36mm
RTX A2000 with custom heatsink 23mm 25mm
RTX 4000 SFF Ada 36mm
Zotac GTX 1050 (ti) 24mm 20mm
Zotac GTX 1650 24mm 20mm
Zotac RTX 3050 6GB 24mm 20mm

How quiet does it get?

As for the results, they are spectacular. I ran a test with 3 cards total: The MSI GTX 1050ti, MSI GTX 1650 and the RTX A2000 using my custom copper heatsink.

I use two Noctua NF-A6x25 PWM fans rotating at a speed of 1000 RPM at idle and 1800 RPM under full load, both inaudible speeds at 30 cm distance. The MSI cards didn't go higher than 75C, while the RTX A2000 didn't even go higher than 67C.

As you can see, deshrouding is a big improvement over idle speeds of 3000 RPM that the original coolers tend to have!

Do you want an inaudible Yocto too?

Enjoy a handcrafted and stylish home theater or console that you don't have to hide from sight!