Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Passive Cooling Mod

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Modifying a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for Passive Cooling

Three years ago, we published Passively Cooling Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti...With An AMD Sink. The result was, given the performance metrics of the time, a successful operation to turn first-gen Maxwell into a silent gamer by putting our trust in the company's ability to monitor temperature and scale frequency/voltage to obey a defined target.

But now GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti are available and we have a new challenge to face. After all, GTX 750 Ti was a 60W card, and the two 1050s are rated at 75W. We even went so far as to dig out our 2013 setup up with its modified cooler to compare the previous generation, plus GTX 650, in a passively-cooled shoot-out.

At a basic level, this is a battle of architectures: Kepler versus Maxwell versus Pascal. But it'll be interesting to see how each generation copes with the build's thermal limitations, and measure how far hardware improvements have come over the past three years.


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Igor Wallossek
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bloodroses
    That giant cooler is so funny looking on that little card. :)
    Reply
  • FormatC
    The smallest guys have the biggest cars ;)
    Reply
  • sephirotic
    Full passive is pointless, semi passive is the way to go.
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Thank you for the really nice article Igor. It was an unexpected surprise and a pleasure to read. :-) Very interesting to read.
    Reply
  • Poozle
    you know setting the fans to even minimal (20-30%) where you cant detect an audible difference would be safer and nearly as quiet... but I digress
    Reply
  • FormatC
    The problem is, that the marketing is telling us that it works. I ordered an original passive card directly from a manufacturer and will check it in a short follow-up. Without any airflow in the case this must fail ;)
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    19136703 said:
    That giant cooler is so funny looking on that little card. :)
    It immediately reminded me of Sapphire's R9 Fury Tri-X:


    Reply
  • FormatC
    Same principle, but the used cooler is 4 years old.
    It seems that Sapphire copied the idea ;)
    Reply
  • thor220
    It looks like the large tail of that Cooler isn't even doing anything. No point in making a passive cooler that big if it can't transfer the heat.

    I would much rather see a passive water cooled setup with no fans, only the pump.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    19139141 said:
    It looks like the large tail of that Cooler isn't even doing anything. No point in making a passive cooler that big if it can't transfer the heat.
    What makes you say that? The heat pipes extend the length of the cooler, even the fins at the end should be absorbing and dissipating some of the heat.
    Reply