Fan Stop enabled on Asus GTX 970 Turbo OC

[Drakorius]

I've always found the blower fan on this card to be quite noisy but it wasn't installed on my main system so I never gave much tought about it. Recently I started to think about installing Unraid on the main system to run two windows and linux VMs side by side on the same computer and I wanted to do pci passthrough so I needed a second GPU. 

But the fan of the 970 even at idle and at minimum RPM was still noisy so I decided to buy on amazon a simple 5 euros 12V thermostat that will cut off power to the fan under a certain temperature limit. 

The thermostat, as it works with 12V, get's powered from the 8 pin connector and I've locked the thermal sensor in between some fins of the cooler and then covered it in thermal paste.

 

After some testing I found that the card with the fan turned off ad idle never went over 71C (it's a bit toasty but still acceptable) so I set the thermostat to give power to the fan at 77C (to make sure that the fan will turn on only if some long workload on the gpu started) and to turn it off at 62C.

 

Here is a picture of the finished work: