Quietest, coolest graphics card.

quarryman

I'm looking for a card that I can use in my Shuttle. I've had a lend of a GeForce Ti 4200 for a while but the fan is sooo loud and it runs quite hot. I'm looking for something that I can use that might allow me to control the fan speed. For this reason it would need to run quite cool.

The 9800 Pros are fairly cheap at the moment but I'd need to use a Zalman cooler to keep the heat down, which I can't do since its an SFF.

Anyone know of any good NVidias offering s that might be a good solution. Performance needs to be good since it'll be used quite a bit for gaming.

TIA

Big Chief

Originally posted by quarryman


The 9800 Pros are fairly cheap at the moment but I'd need to use a Zalman cooler to keep the heat down, which I can't do since its an SFF.

quarryman

actually i meant an Artic cooler. I don't think I'm ready to butcher my Shuttle that much yet!

unkel

Hehe Big Chief - interesting solution :cool:

Not too good for the old airflow though, never mind the dust getting in!

Col_Loki

With alot of the graphics card coolers out now, you tend to have to give up a PCI slot inorder to disapate the heat silently..... ie they have to be big!!

Prob the best solution from every angle is the Artic Cooler, its pretty cheap, easy to install, fantastic performance, and silent operation. But it will take up space on the front of the GFX card. The back of it is very small and nothing to worry about. If you can manage the size of it then its definetly the one to go for. There is a switch which allows a change from 5v to 12v, at 5v you wont hear it.... at 12v its more noticable.

A good review can be found here..... http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&number=8&artpage=581&articID=149

Measures both performance, silence and shows the fitting.

You will prob notice that the smaller coolers are far more noisey as the fan has to spin faster. Have a look at the link and see what you think. Generally when it comes to such performance cards like the 5900's / 9800's there highly overclocked and are bound to run hot. I'll keep an eye out for another solution (save you a PCI slot) but im not sure if ill find one.......

[edit] PS Zalman HP is fantastic also, but cutting up your case to fit it is crazy ..... very nice all the same, good job BTW!!

Loki

secret_squirrel

The artic wont fit in a shuttle tho....

My solution was to replace my stock AIW 9800se's fan with a vantec vga cooler fan. Its not much quieter at full speed but you connect the fan to one of the fan headers and then I use speedfan to keep all my fans quiet, then crank it up whem Im in a game.

According the Shuttle forum on sudhian.com you can mod one of the passive coolers to fit with a bit of inginuitey (without hurting your case)
here are the forums. If you do a search on 9800 or cooling you're prolly find it.

And someone else might know this but I think one of the manufacturers is bringing out a passively cooled 9800pro soon. Can remember which one tho....

Col_Loki

Sapphire have a passivly cooled card out at the min, its the "ultimate" range...... basicly a 9800pro with a Zalman stuck on!! Was the first thing i thought of but had a look at the size and figured it wouldnt fit.

silverside

I'm getting a 9800pro for an SFF. Seeing as I needed a DVI card anyway, the 9800pro was cheap enough to make it worth getting.

does anyone know if it is easy to undervolt/underclock them and slow the fan down using such things as speedfan and atitool? Would that make much difference to the noise and heat?

I'll let you know how i get on.

silverside

squirrel, was it much hassle to install that new cooler and does block the adjacent PCI slot?

secret_squirrel

nope it doesnt block the pci slot and there is maybe even a little more clearance at the side of my shuttle case than there was before. It was a doddle to install the new fan, much easier than a cpu heatsink/fan for example, just pop the old one off, add a blob of paste and pop the new one on.

Its also one of them neon jobbies, if that floats ya boat, doesnt do anything for me, but since it comes as standard I wasnt complaining. The kit also comes with 4 stickon copper heatsinks for the Ram on the 9800. The amount of heat that comes off them is a little scarey!

I got mine from tekheads.co.uk cos most other places were out of stock. Just make sure you order the right one coz I got confuzzled and didnt the first time.

The only downside I can think it has is no temp sensor, but since I use speedfan to control it I've got it linked to the cpu temp on the assumption that when the cpu is at a high temp the vga card is likely to be as well.

Was gonna play around under/overclocking but havent got round to it yet. Since there's no easy way to measure the temp of the GFX chip Im not sure how to tell how effective clocking/volting would be anyhow.....

I think most of the 9800 pro fans are connected to the card, and so dont have a long enough cable to reach a MB fan header - even if they had a 3 pin fan connector on them...hence me getting the vantec.

One word of warning tho...its deffers not a huge amount quieter at full blast - so dont expect miracles....

silverside

ta.

I don't mind the noise at full blast. My reckoning is that when playing music or dvd's, I won't be overloading the CPU or GFX, so will want to and be able to turn the fan down then.
When gaming, the sound effects etc will mask any noise so i'll let the fan rip. I am assuming that ATITool and SpeedFan together will make this approach easy.

secret_squirrel

just for further info I've just had my AIW 9800 SE (softmodded to 9800) running wma's all evening with the fan off with no problems......