I guys, I am new into the RTX graphic card series (currently running a 4090 from Asus Tuf) and I noticed one can switch the card manually from silent to performance mode.Three questions i have:
does it really makes a difference in MSFS switching from silent to performance?
is there a way to see in which mode I am without opening the case?
is it ok to leave the card always on performance mode? Or will it shorten its lifetime considerably?
Thanks 
I leave my 3090 Ti mildly overclocked all the time, and just let the fans do their thing. Noise goes up, but when I’m flying I hardly notice it.
As I have an AMD graphics card it may be totaly different, but:
I also have a switch for a silent mode, that I activated as I wanted to have an comupter that is as silent as possible when I´m not gaming. And only in this silent mode the fan isn´t running crazy on boot.
And as I thought this is a decent gaming graphics card that I could use it with this mode for gaming. As I´m not experienced and dind´t want to overclock or maximize anything I didn´t care for the graphics card settings. After almost two years flying MSFS I stumbled upon the fact that the fan/temperature curve was set to low even for the highest GPU temperatures. So in my case it was the other way around! Playing MSFS in silent mode was definetely not very good for my graphics card (and caused, god knows how many, CTDs). I´m glad that I found that and am able to set a normal fan/temperature curve for gaming without switching of the silent mode in general.
As already mentioned: I´m not an expert. But I guess using a graphics card with any factory settings can´t hurt it while brutal overclocking might can…