High End Silent Cooling For Graphics Cards 199
SpinnerBait writes "With all the competition these days in the 3D Accelerator market, Graphics
Card OEMs are doing anything they can to differentiate their products in a sea
of competitive solutions. Recently board designs are getting even more
exotic, with brightly colored PCBs, high end heat sink and fan combinations and
even flashing lights for the case modders out there. However, a relatively
new trend is Quiet Computing.
HotHardware has an article up that showcases two new Radeon 9600 Pro and 9800
Pro cards from Sapphire Tech, that have rather impressive fanless coolers on
them that are virtually silent. Great stuff for those of you gaming in the
library."
Re:What would excite me is a lower price (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What would excite me is a lower price (Score:1, Informative)
Same old Zalman cooler (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sacrificing a PCI slot?? (Score:2, Informative)
It's definately a must have for my mobo in the future.
Re:Virtually silent? (Score:2, Informative)
Fan reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What would excite me is a lower price (Score:3, Informative)
Why was this reply modded down to 0:Troll? The parent asked for cheap graphics cards; this guy explained where to get one. A question was asked and answered. How is that a troll?
I also bought a GeForce 4 MX from Newegg.com for my HTPC for $44 just about a week ago. No, this is not going to give you Radeon 9800 performance, but you get what you pay for. The nice thing about the graphics card market is that there's something out there for everybody right now. No, the cheap cards don't get the headlines but that's to be expected. The good news is there are highly capable graphics cards out there that will be perfectly satisfying to almost anyone all up and down the line at every price point. You can literally buy an older, slower graphics card for $20-$30 that will give you solid 2D performance and even let you play most 3D games at lower resolutions happily. Or, if you've got the cash, you can shell out for one of the hot new Radeons or GeForce FX's.
What I usually do is wait until I can double my current performance for around $100. In my main PC I have a GeForce 4 Ti4200, which cost me $108 about a year ago (upgrading from a GeForce 2, which is still a perfectly good card and now lives in a PC I built for my mother). This was one of the fastest cards available at the time and it's still among the fastest today. No complaints here, and I think it'll be a while until I upgrade again - probably not until games really start requiring DirectX 9 capability to work.
Re:Let's get serious on quiet (Score:5, Informative)
There are some good drives these days that are very quiet. Seagate Barracuda series drives are legendary among the Quiet PC crowd. Although other manufacturers are also bringing out quiet drives.
If you really want a silent computer you might as well get some information:
How to Quiet the Thing [7volts.com]
Silent PC Review [silentpcreview.com]
--
Simon
Tom's Hardware Review (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real future (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fan reliability (Score:3, Informative)
1: The G4 cube is nowhere near "totally silent" for one reason: hard drive noise. The only reason we don't hear the spinning in most PCs is because of the fans.
2: HDD noise will decrease over time; I have two Samsung Spinpoint P40 drives which have a DSP designed to reduce seek noise. So the objective should be to make fan noise less loud than the HDD spin noise. Many of the HP Compaq workstations accomplish this with quiet, thermally managed fans.
So, completely passive cooling is nice. Heck, I have a Zalman in my system. But I also have 3 Panaflo L1A fans and an Alpha 8045. The're all thermally managed and monitored. Thus, fan noise is not an issue. My two HDDs are far louder.
Re:Let's get serious on quiet (Score:4, Informative)
You could save a lot of effort and just build a quiet PC. In my experience it's a lot cheaper and easier to eliminate noise by the careful selection of noise generating components rather than building large enclosures. Enclosures you might think would block noise can often actually *amplify* it by acting like a horn or resonator.
Anyways... Here are my current picks for a quiet PC:
Overclocking: Don't
CPU Heatsink: Heatsinks change so fast that giving you specific models is pointless. However, as a general rule, if it comes with it's own fan, chances are it's too freakin' loud. Stock HSF combo's from Intel and AMD are right out. Look for a hefty heatsink with a lot of surface area made out of a conductive metal like copper. You can find heat dissipation spec's for most heatsinks online. Odds are you will have to spend 50 bucks or so here, but it's one place not to cheap out. Don't forget to use thermal paste when you install it!
CPU Fan: If you have a good heatsink installed properly you won't need a freakin' hoover to keep your CPU running cool. The minimum ammount of airflow you'll need is going to depend on how much heat your CPU generates and how well your heatsink dissipates heat. I've found that even a 20CFM (cubic feet per minute) fan will do well even on a high end athlon if you have the right heatsink. For comparison, some stock fans do upwards of 120CFM.
Graphics Card Cooling: Go passive. Buy a card with a passive cooler or replace the fan. Those little wussy fans they put on graphics card may look innocuous, but many are cheap pieces of crap that will develop a high-pitched and loud whine in short order. Cheap fans, no matter how small, are the bane of silent computing.
Motherboard Cooling: Ditto. If it has a fan, replace it with a heatsink or don't buy it in the first place. The latter is my personal choice.
Hard-Drives: Once I would have written pages on suspension techniques, enclosures, network booting, etc. to tell you how to avoid noisy hard-drives. Now I can just tell you to buy Seagate Barracuda's. While other manufacturers are closing the gap, these suckers still have a hefty 6dB lead on anything WD has, and a wider lead for any other manufacturer.
Case Fans: Guess what. 20CFM fans are all you need here too. I usually have one blow into the case over the hard-drives and another blow out of the case by the CPU cooler, but there are other configurations you can use. The key thing here it to pick high-quality quiet fans. I swear by 20CFM Panaflo's. Three of them (2 case fans, 1 CPU fan) will not be audible over even a very quiet PSU. These fans are about $15 CAD, so aren't bank breakers either. You can get fans that move more air, but don't bother unless you find you need that extra airflow. If you do, add more low-CFM fans to work in parallel rather than installing high-CFM fans. Note that Panaflo makes other 80mm fans with more airflow, but they are much louder. Stick with the 20CFM fanss.
Power Supply Units: If you've built the rest of your machine properly, the fans in your PSU will be the *only* thing you normally hear. I consider PSU's to be the one item that is lagging behind the rest out there. You can pay a fortune for a fanless PSU such as those TK Power makes, or you can buy a PSU with too much fan noise. Things are getting better though. Antec's Truepower PSU's are high-quality units that are pretty quiet and are also very affordable. They're lightyears ahead of anything Enermax makes anyways. I'd try one of them out first and see if it's too loud for you before resorting to more extreme measures. After that, you can try opening up the PSU and modding the fans to run on lower voltage or use different fans. If all else fails, you can go fanless, but it will cost you bigtime!
Water-cooling: Since the PSU in a system built under these guidelines is all you'll hear, if you aren't willing to watercool your PSU then there's no point to it at all. Watercooled PSU's have yet to go mainstream, so this is heavy modding territory. I have encountered many watercooling systems where the water-pump alone is noisier than three of my systems. Watercooling isn't where it's at... yet. It may be the future though.
Re:What would excite me is a lower price (Score:3, Informative)
ATI with the new ATI Mobility GPUs are pushing a standard interface for being upgradeable.
It is up to the manufacturers to take advantage of using this interface though, so with Apple, cross your fingers.
In the PC world, there are a couple of manufacturers that are already supporting the ATI GPU with the upgradeable interface, so that you will be able to drop in the next faster ATI Graphics Processor when it comes out and not have your laptop locked into the GPU it shipped with.
I only hope NVidia is working on a similar design or even a compatible design so that a laptop user could switch GPU manufacturers.
PS - Yes I know that within product lines, you can already rip out most Laptop GPU boards and replace them with the next minimal upgraded versions(i.e. Pull Geforce4 440Go 32mb - Replace with Geforce4 460Go 64mb); however, the ATI interface specification is for moving all the way to an entire new GPU architecture as the technology advances over a few years.