The Sapphire Nitro 580 is pretty much getting to be end of life, as we are about 2 months away from the AMD 6000 release dates, but I decided to do some mods and learned quite a bit about the tools and software you'll need. Let me share the story.
Sapphire Nitro 580
In it's day this was a pretty inexpensive and solid card for 1080p gaming. The card comes overclocked out of the factory at about 1.4 GHz vs. 1.3 GHz stock, and comes with the Sapphire Trix OC utility which will help you watch the entire card, including the fan speeds from one convenient point of view. Solid behaving software too. Sapphire uses PWM controlled, easy to replace fans. Takes 1 set screw for each fan, and you can pull the whole thing out. They measure to
be 90mm each. At maximum load this card pulls down about 180W, so you can imagine the heat it generates.
In terms of noise and temps, the cards at full load were honestly pretty noisy. I could just hear them with my headphones on. The question is, can I do better??
The Contenders
The GPU fan specs are rated for 3,000 RPM so I decided to try to match this with Noctua NF-F12 heavy duty fans. About $25 each. I swear to god, Noctua is the only fan maker who has never caused me a problem. Cooler Master, Corsair, Thermaltake, Gigabyte, I have had issues with every single vendor except Noctua.
Rather than use cable ties I'm using a neat little bracket from Maxmoral.
Hard to see, but on the left is a bracket that slides into the back of your case, turning your two 120mm fans into one tidy assembly.
The Sapphire card uses a rare 5-pin PWM connector. Your average PWM splitter will be too large to fit, so you can order a neat little adapter from ModDIY which is in Hong Kong, or you can connect to an empty fan slot on your Motherboard. Here is where things get tricky. AFAIK the motherboards will only spin up fans based on onboard (i.e. CPU or MB sensor) temps. They don't look at GPU temps, unless you have this great software package, the Argus Monitor toolkit. For $10 I highly recommend it. Not only is it clean, it's effing reliable. Again, I'm so sick of fancy light/fan controls that are broken. Argus is completely solid.
OK, but why do you need this? Argus will take control over ALL your motherboard fans and allow you to select a temp source! That's right, now you can use the GPU, or hard disk or whatever temp you want to control your fans! Please get it and register it, totally worthwhile.
I got impatient and used Argus, and it works fine, but I just got the cable, with the extra cost sleeving, and it looks great, and has the exact came connector as the Sapphire shroud. 5-Pin VGA PWM Mini PH Connector to Dual PWM 4-Pin Fan Cable Splitter
Even if you get the ModDIY cables, there's another good reason for Argus: You can control your case fans based on the GPU temp. In my case with an AIO CPU cooler, there's really not much for the case fans to do based on CPU temp, but by letting the GPU set the case fan speed via Argus I can really increase the air movement when gaming.
The Installation
Sapphire accomplishes their Nitro street cred by adding not just easy to replace and clean fans but a really beefy cooler. Take a look. By removing the shroud and placing the 120mm fans right next to it we'll accomplish nearly 100% surface area coverage. That is, almost all of those cooling fins will have air pushed onto it. Installation in this case was super simple. Remove the 5 screws on the back holding the shroud, unplug the LED and fan connectors and bam, you are left with the naked radiator.
This brings me to another subject: What about 140mm fans? Honestly not needed, but the increased dead space at the hub the fan becomes an issue. With 120 being near ideal coverage, 140s would waste space in the center and edges. Based on my testing, if you decide to get other fans, make sure they will do at least 2,000 RPM, this will let you hit the sweet spot of 1,500 to 1,800 without stressing them. I'd caution you against 1,700 RPM fans, you'll be using them at their max often.
Above you can see how tight the fans are to the GPU without any need for additional cable ties.
The Results
The success or failure of this project is in the fan speed tweaking. At full GPU load if you are comfortable with hovering around 65 degrees you can set the fan speeds to go from 40-50% at 60 to 70 degrees. This is quiet. Not dead quiet, but very quiet and with headphones unnoticeable. If you want quieter you can trade a little more heat for a little less fan speed.
A nice side-benefit of this project is that the graphics card fans no longer just cool the card but the motherboard mounted M.2 storage cards as well. I use two Samsung 970 drives. One is directly underneath the GPU radiator and the other between the PSU and the fan array. I put inexpensive heat sinks on my M.2 and they idle at about 30 degrees. With the GPU temp rising the drive directly underneath the radiator would idle significantly hotter, around 45 or more. Now it stays pretty frosty even when game playing. If you run your drives and your GPU hot, this is a huge win.
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