Well-known overclocker der8auer has created a custom Radeon RX 5700 XT Noctua edition, an idea inspired by the recently announced ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Edition. His 15-minute video has already had over 35,000 views since its posting.
The card used has seen some better days. Covered in dust and dirt, it required some extensive cleaning. The fan shroud is removed, disassembled, and then replaced by a custom machined and sandblasted aluminum one that retains some of the aesthetics of the original. The new shroud is fitted with 3x NF-A9x14 HS-PWM fans, black in color. Despite a couple of mishaps, the new shroud came out nicely.
The original cooler is cleaned and reused, as are the cooling pads. The cooling performance was not as good as expected, so he took it apart again and redid the cooling paste and used some better washers. This allowed for better pad compression and improved contact with the cooler. Those results dropped the CPU temperature to 69°C.
It had been reported that the Radeon RX 5700 XT would remain in production until around Q1 2021. Those with the right resources could extend its use further with such a mod while sprucing up its appearance.
Onto performance, then, and der8auer notes that it’s actually not the quietest card ever, nor the coolest. The graphics card hits an average temperature of around 81°C, and the memory sits at around 70°C.
But that’s not the last word in temperatures. Through some additional washers, der8auer was able to place additional pressure on the heatsink and compress the thermal pads further, which made better contact and resulted in GPU temperature dropping to 69°C.