High End Silent Cooling For Graphics Cards

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:silent fans but noisy games....

[rokzy]

the problem with noisy graphics cards isn't the noise they make during noisy games, it's the noise they make the other 99.8% of the time

Virtually silent?

[chabotc]

..fanless coolers on them that are virtually silent..

Care to explain how graphic cards with no fans, no moving parts at all are virtually silent? The cooling solution is totally passive, and thus makes no noice at all.. if it does, something went very, very wrong and it's probably the sound of the heavy cooling solution breaking your motherboard or graphic card ;-)

Nothing to see here

[bahamat]

No big news. All they did was take a Zalman [zalman.co.kr] vga cooler and package it with the card.

The only thing that really makes this significant, is that if it comes with the card you can't void your warranty by placing something "too heavy" on it.

What about the rest of the computer?

[gagy]

I've been sleeping next to noisy computers for most of my life. Back in the BBS era I'd have things download overnight, so I'm rather used to to all the noise. But if I was overly concerned with the noise, I wouldn't really care about the vid. card. There are much noisier components in a system, mainly the powersupply and some hard drives can be quite loud. People are now installing two or three case fans as well, adding to the cunundrum. I really don't think that adding one more noisy object to the mix would change things.

I know that some people spend their fortunes on quiet powersupplies and sound insulation and these cards might be what they're looking for, but for the most part they're a small nieche market.

Enough!

[Junks Jerzey]

Slashdotters love to make fun of soccer moms driving big, fuel wasting SUVs, then these same people go out and get monster graphics cards that need crazy cooling nonsense. In all honesty, maybe we've crossed the line here? The little benefit these cards are resulting in (remember, 98% of all games still aren't making use of pixel shaders) is not worth all of the energy waste, not to mention all the wasted materials that go into heat sinks and heat pipes and all of that.

What about...

[Enigma1625]

water cooling? It is becoming more popular and I can only imagine prices will start to become more reasonable. Completely silent, and more effective than fans/heatsinks; what more could you ask for?

Let's get serious on quiet

[pair-a-noyd]

When I was a kid my mother used to tell me that silence is golden. I hated to hear those words then. Now I know that she was right.

I am bloody sick of loud ass hard drives and fans and everything else. The fans are no big deal but the hard drives are the real problem.
I've yet to see a hard drive that doesn't scream like a small dog in pain. That noise goes through your head like a bayonet.

I'm building a huge cabinet to put *ALL* of my equipment in made out of an old soda water cooler from a drive in store. It's sound proof and thermally it will keep the heat in so I can duct it out through the ceiling, thus keeping the computer room cool and saving money on the AC cooling bill. It gets damn hot with all the PC's and laserjets and stuff running..

Let's get some quiet hard drives too folks..
I'm really sick of noisy machines. I'd even like to have a silent fridge if they make one..

Re:What would excite me is a lower price

[Anonymous Coward]

Prices are never going to get cheaper. Lowest performing card(for gaming crowd) will be <$75(Radeon9200, GF4-MX) Entry-level cards will always be $75-125(Radeon9500, GF4-Ti4200). Highest end will always be $300-400(Radeon9800, GF-FX). (Will increase due to inflation obviously).

Why? The chipset designers(ati/nV) try to create one entry for each segment without too much overlap WRT pricing and performace between segments. No one is going to produce cards with older technology when they can use that manufacturing capacity to build other, newer, more profitable cards. Once production has ramped up it never gets cheaper to produce the cards. It does not cost any more to produce a top end card today than it would be to build a Voodoo3.

virtually silent?

[verbatim_verbose]

Huh... virtually silent? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how a large block of aluminum can be anything more than completely silent. ;)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Oh yes it is!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the heatsink is just dumping heat into the cavity of your case, and you will need some serious (and loud) fans to remove it from there.

But that's the thing! The case itself is easy to cool quietly - the case is the only place where you can use as large fans as you want. Larger fans == more airflow for the RPM, lower RPM == less noise. Two 120mm fans should give you all the airflow you'll ever need...

Re:Sacrificing a PCI slot??

[Martin Blank]

Considering that most sound card companies and virtually every NIC company I've researched has advised not putting their cards in the first PCI slot, it kind of becomes moot anyway. Moving those off to other slots leaves modems and what are essentially niche devices -- SCSI, tuner, USB/FireWire, and other add-in cards.

Re:Enough!

[freeweed]

Amazingly enough, not every one of the hundreds of thousands of people that visit Slashdot think the exact same thing on a particular subject. Some of us even drive SUVs.

Wow! Individual thought! Whod'a thunk it?

Actually there's little competition

[Junks Jerzey]

With all the competition these days in the 3D Accelerator market

The vast majority of consumer PCs ship with one of the following:

1. Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (a motherboard chipset roughly equivalent to a TNT2).
2. GeForce 4 MX (essentially GeForce 2 with more fillrate, but without programmable shaders).

The little bit of competition is all at rather small high-end of the market, with nVidia and ATI out diddling each other by a few percent every couple of months. Hardware fanboys excepted, this is uninteresting.