While shopping for other FirePros I stumbled across a seller who has a whole bunch of WX 4100s (similar to RX 460) with aftermarket heat sinks. I actually had to mount a universal water block I had, while I was waiting for the cheap cooler to arrive.
I did manage to finally score an Arctic Accelero TT2 off of this forum but it also did not clear the components. I also tried mounting various stock intel and AMD sinks but they all had component clearance issues. The little stock heat sink is really just terrible, and I really mean spectacularly bad. Most of the stuff on ebay is just junk no better than the stock cooler, but I took a chance on that one $10 cooler and it works fine despite just being aluminum, and a very old design. It's like the companies all discontinued them, and they are nowhere to be found on ebay or amazon. There just aren't any aftermarket heatsinks available anymore. Yeah I had the same problem looking for better heat sinks for W2100 and W4100 that I overclocked like crazy +100%. None of this happens with the W600 (or even a much weaker HD7570, but that one doesn't have 3+ video outputs), so that problem is solved (if I had a spare TB3 dock which would route the iGPU outputs natively, that would likely solve the problem just the same, since the issue isn't with the power of the GPU, but with the whole way DisplayLink works which means a lot of handling of video streams and image output in CPU SW instead of GPU HW). The fact the main display is a 2560x1600 is not helping matters, either, I suspect. Visible lagging when moving/resizing windows, especially bad when video streams are going (such as a conference calls with 4-5 people with video on), or when large Excel spreadsheets are open. The CPU is an i7-8665U, so the iGPU is indeed weaker than the W600 anyway, and that's kinda off-topic to the question of silencing a video card, but because of how DisplayLink works (and how much CPU utilization is higher when it is used rather than the native iGPU output), the on-screen performance is horrible with a DisplayLink dock with multiple displays. It was gathering dust for a while, but recently I used it to fashion myself a TB3 graphics dock for my work Lenovo X390, since I had a spare TB3 to PCIe board and the work issued USB-C dock can't walk and chew gum at the same time (DisplayLink absolutely sucks when there's a lot of video going on on multiple screens).
I have a W600 card that I picked up cheap a long time ago since it was lacking the rear bracket and its a great card for driving a lot of monitors.
How can I make this thing shut the hell up? Ideally, I'd love to give it a passive cooler: It sits naked, so it has plenty of cool air around around it, and it isn't exactly a powerhouse of a card (it is in the ballpark of a HD7750 or GTX650), nor does it spend much time under load, but I can't find anything at all. I tried looking around, since many (many, many, many) years ago things like the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 existed to silence video cards, but it looks like all of these products are now extinct.
I tried software fan control via Afterburner, but the minimum setting of 25% is still loud, and the card tops out at 51C with the fan on minimum even when under 100% load, so this is still overkill. I repasted the card just in case, but that doesn't help with the fan noise since the fan isn't really well controlled on this card, so it keeps whining away even if the card is idling at 32C. It would be loud if it were in a case, but since it sitting naked on my desk, it is driving me crazy. It works absolutely great, but there's one problem: The damn fan on the W600 is annoyingly loud.