 Welcome to a completely new format here on Linus Tech Tips. It's our video version of a guide we found somewhere on the internet. Oh wait, so hold on a second, so you're saying that's not different from what we normally do? Well, come on! I mean, there is at least a unique spin on it this time, and on the subject of spin, if you haven't checked out empty warehouse chair racing and subscribed to our other channel, Channel Superfun, maybe now is the time. The Cooler Master Nova Touch TKL is powered by Topper Hybrid Capacitive switches for the ultimate typing experience, and is now available for a reduced price. Click my face to learn more. Alright, so what's different about this online guide conversion is that we are basing the video on content that was posted on our own website by the user Lays, where he, or at least I assume he based on the pitch of his voice, but you never can know, demonstrates that you don't have to buy an ASUS Strix or EVGA card with a fanless mode to get your GTX 900 series Maxwell-based graphics card to run completely silent at idle or even in lightweight games. So let's start by addressing the big question that a lot of people have first. Why on earth would you want your fans to turn off? They're not that loud in the first place, and they're just gonna turn back on again when you fire up any kind of demanding game or other application? Anyway, get a good pair of noise-isolating headphones and call it a day. Well, that's where you're partially wrong. For one thing, perceived loudness is dependent on the environment in which the PC is being used and personal tolerances. To you, the ambient noise in the room or the other fans in your system might overpower the quiet idle noise of the Nvidia reference or MSI TwinFrozer or whatever other cooler you have on your graphics card, but for people up late writing, for example, in a quiet room, a nice quiet PC can be pretty important, and as they start replacing fans in their system, they quickly get to the point where the graphics card fan, one that they have, it's pretty tough to replace, is the loudest part. And to address the whole get headphones suggestion, I mean, not everyone likes headphones. And why should I have to put something on my face or just deal with it when there is literally no reason my computer should be making any noise when I'm playing music, for example, something that's been possible to do on fanless, low-power portable devices for decades at this point? Which leads us to the guide. Now, normally, unless your GPU supports fanless operation out of the box, your MSI Afterburner custom fan profile, which you can access like this, will have these dotted lines on it to denote the maximum and minimum values that your fan will operate at. You can drag the button down to 0 RPM, but it won't do anything without the modification posted by Layz, which will summarize, but I'm sure he'd also appreciate if you check out the link in the video description and post some positive comments in the forum thread if you liked his guide. Alright, so first, you need to gather the tools you'll need. Maxwell BIOS Tweaker, GPU-Z, and NVFlash. Save your BIOS using GPU-Z to a folder of your choice in the root of your drive. We're going to call it NVFlash by pressing this button. Copy all the zipped files from Maxwell BIOS Tweaker and NVFlash and blah-blah-blah, all that stuff, into the same folder as your backed up BIOS. Open the BIOS Tweaker app. Open BIOS by clicking here and navigating to it. It should be pretty close by. Then there's a bunch of stuff that you can tweak in here, but most of it goes beyond the scope of this guide. We're just going to change RPM 11 per 01 and RPM 01 to 0 to change the minimum value in RPM and percentage of our fan to 0. When that's done, save your BIOS as some other file name so you retain a copy of your original BIOS that you can flash the card back to so that it's in its stock configuration in the event that you ever need to send it in for warranty service. Then go into Device Manager and disable your graphics card. Don't worry if the screen goes black or does anything funny. This is only temporary. Next, press Windows and type command, then right-click and open as administrator. Type in CD space C colon backslash NVFlash and press enter. Then type NVFlash space dash six space and the name of your BIOS dot ROM. Then press enter, press Y, wait for the flash process to complete. I'd actually highly recommend being connected to a battery backup during this time. Restart, re-enable your graphics card in Device Manager, reboot again for good measure, then fire up MSI Afterburner and it's off to the races. Now you can configure your custom fan profile however you want. So depending on if you just want silence at idle and otherwise a pretty normal fan curve or if you want to be able to limit your GPU's load through the use of V-Sync, G-Sync or some other frame rate limiter in-game, for example, to try and get silent gaming going, you'll want to tune this differently. But this follow-up post in the forum from Lace has a solid-looking suggested curve that ramps up the fan to keep your GPU safe as it heats up while keeping it quiet when nothing's shaken. Once you've got it dialed in and you like the GPU's overall behavior and noise level under various loads, simply put a value between 10 and 15 degrees into the Historesis box. This keeps the fan from constantly ramping up and down when the temperature is right on the threshold of a major RPM shift, which can be annoying. And then you're done. So the last things to address in this video are these. Linus, I did this and my GPU is running at like 60 to 65 degrees at idle at the desktop. Is that okay? The answer is pretty much, yeah. While lower temperatures are better for electronics, 60 degrees is nowhere near the fast and painful death danger zone. And if Nvidia thought that this was bad for it, none of these cards would feature a fanless mode. What about this one then? Linus, how does this affect the warranty of my card? Well, if your GPU manufacturer does not allow BIOS flashing under the warranty terms, my recommendation would be to, like I said before, flash that backup that you saved back onto the card before attempting to get any kind of warranty service. They can't tell you did it. But with that said, if you were to brick your card as part of this process, the honest thing to do would be to suck it up, since it's not covered, and take better precautions like using a battery backup next time. Speaking of taking better precautions, Crunchyroll is a way to take precautions against missing your favorite anime shows. It's the anime site created by anime fans for anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan, like Parasite the Maxim and Kuroko's Basketball 3, with a large collection of the most popular anime series like Naruto and One Piece. And all the content on their site is professionally subtitled. So all you gotta do is head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium, which gives you a whole month of free anime, completely ad-free. Then if you enjoy the many benefits of premium, you know, membership, like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream anywhere from a variety of devices like your phone, tablet, game console, you know, your Etch A Sketch. Actually, that doesn't work, because an Etch A Sketch doesn't have a network connection, unless you have, like, a really great Etch A Sketch. Like, I really wonder if that would be a successful product, like Smart Etch A Sketch. Anyway, the point is that Crunchyroll is only $6.95 a month. If you enjoy it, so head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus to check them out. So thank you guys for watching this video. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. If you have any comments, you want to discuss the contents of the video, or just really anything with our community, we have a link to our forum in the video description below. We also have links for our merch, like cool t-shirts like this one, where you can give us a contribution if you love what we're doing, and you think that we should keep doing it forever, or if you want to just change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code, that kind of thing helps us out a lot. We'll get a small kickback whenever you buy, you know, your graphics card to do this, you know, tweak on, or whatever else the case may be. So I think that's pretty much it. Guys, don't forget to check out our other channels, Tech Quickie and Channel Superfun, and subscribe to this one slash follow, do all those good things. I think we're done here. Thanks again for watching.