I dont get really this.. I have a stock air-cooled asus GTX 970, and for almost all use cases on my PC it is completely silent. The fans only turn on when the card temp goes over a certain value. The only thing that causes this is a modern taxing AAA type game (eg. The witcher 3). And when I'm playing a game like that Ive got my headphones on.
I can be running Unity, visual studio, adobe premier, illustrator, photoshop, discord, trello, github + a million browser tabs and whatnot and it maketh not a peep.
So, unless ure AAA gaming an average of the shelf GPU these days is passively cooled already.
You say you don't get it, but then you boast how your gear is basically silent. Great, that's what I want too!
But I'm not talking about your custom-built gaming PC, we're talking about an eGPU case for a Macbook.
My experience with these type of peripherals (eg external hard drives) is they often say they have a 'quiet fan' but it's not really quiet. And I think it's something I read about being a problem with other eGPU cases.
I have this stuff in my living room. The Macbook is basically silent. I don't want a bunch of noisy fans to come on (they all add up...) every time I dock the laptop and try to do some work.
I won't be gaming. I might have headphones on to do some video editing, if my partner is trying to do her own work in the same room. But I don't want to be obliged to wear them just because of noisy hardware.
It's very nice that you wear headphones when you're playing a game. Me, and probably a lot of other people, don't.
You not being able to hear the GPU when using headphones does not mean it's quiet. It means you can't hear it. Incidentally, any other people in the room or maybe even in the adjacent rooms would be able to hear it very well.
this is important to me, glad to hear it!