You can always go aftermarket cooler, the Prolimatech MK-26 VGA Cooler is a good candidate, on the case of MSI is a pretty easy change as it has frontal plate that cools VRMS and Memory, so in essence you just unscrew the cooler, clean up the old paste, apply new paste, align the MK26 and install the 4 screws, connect the cables/fans. I think EVGA on their recent cards follows a similar design for the frontal plate, it does has some extra tabs on the middle of the gpu, not sure if that would affect the installation, probably not, but its the only thing that i can see that might.birthdaymonkey wrote:I'm also starting to feel disappointed with my EVGA 1070 SC. I bought it in the middle of the summer, when I had a dehumidifier running, so it's only now that the dehumidifier is off that I'm noticing the noises it makes. My main issue isn't the fans under load - although they do make a "ball bearing" hiss at all speeds, I'm fine with a bit of noise when I'm gaming. My issue is with the fans twitching at idle. Now that my room is often silent, I can hear an audible sound every time the fans twitch (which happens every few seconds). I don't know why EVGA's fans have this behavior when other manufacturers' fans just... idle at idle. Of course, it's much too late to return the card at this point, so I guess it's either put up with the noise or sell the card and buy a different one at a loss.
If you go for it, consider fans like Noctua that has very good PWM range of operation, personally i would chose fans that dont stop on 0% pwm but that drop super low, my suggestion is Noctua NF-S12B 1200PWM, if you want the fans to stop you could go with NF-S12A PWM or NF-F12 PWM. Also remember the mk26 will take 4 slots, and you need some space in the back as the screws stick up a little, but if you do have the space it should be a good upgrade both in quiet and performance.