Silent Mid Range Video Cards

ntba

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 28, 2005
Messages
185
I've been mulling over getting a new video card similar to the ASUS Stryx 960 as I've read it doesn't even spin up the fans until its taxed. I've also heard on near silent systems that it can start to whine (electronic noises or coil whine)

If there is anything that I hate more than fan noise, its coil whine. Its worse.

I think I've read that MSI has a 960 that works the same way but I forgot. I'd like some other options that would be the same as the stryx just confirmed with no coil whine.

What other cards don't spin up fans at all until under heavy load? I don't want ANY moving fans while I'm browsing or reading. This is 90% of the time. a Mid Range card or something equivalent to the 5850 I have now.

My 5850 still runs fine but the aftermarket cooler I put on it a while ago is quite loud. It can still play BF4 and most other games on high so I was thinking that the stryx 960 would be comparable, just not as loud. IF it has coil whine, it'll drive me nuts
 
GPU Coil whine its a matter of luck.. nobody can guarantee a coil whine free card... also in most cases not only depend entirely of the GPU, every electronic component can suffer from coil whine, and the most typical cause and component suffering from this even people doesn't notice it ever its the PSU. PSU its the major cause of Coil Whine in a system.

But I also people seems to ignore few things about coil whine and just blame GPUs without take into consideration things as uber HIGH FPS, yes 1000+FPS in benchmark or some start menu in games without a frame limiter or vsync will yes or yes cause Coil Whine, and that's happening since years ago. so most people you hear "my card its a shit with coil whine while benchmarks and some games" well that's the reason..

Also Coil Whine depend in the power receiving your system. so if live in a house with improper Ground and full of dirty energy/current may cause the PSU to have Coil Whine. and well there is just a lot of cause of coil whine..

Actually in topic I think most manufacturers have the famous and crap (just IMHO) "Zero RPM" Feature so all will idle and have fans turned off under light load or anything bellow 60C..
 
I'm expressly familier with all the things you've mentioned quite well. It's just that most reviews SPECIFICALLY mention this card as having it.

My PSU is fine and so is everything else. My fanless desktop switch had whine and it was faulty, new one didn't. My old centrino based laptop had massive whine in certain C-states and so did others, so I understand.

I'm not sure if its just biased because this card has no running fans all the time or not. I was under the impression that having no fans running was NOT the norm. I've not experienced ANY cards during the time I built my system having "zero db" feature and I thought only Asus implemented it with such large coolers and optimization.

My question still stands though, what other manufacturers have such cards comparable to the stryx 960 with the "zero db" feature specifically as I'd like to compare. From what you tell me, it seems like its a lot and I would value even more the opinion of others as apparently this feature is not a rarity as I first thought but quite common and I wasn't aware.
 
"zero db" feature is crap. And I would not base my decision on which card to buy by that feature.

Any reason why?

My need is for a silent card 90% of the time and a fairly good card 10% of the time.

I want to have a fairly reasonable card available, just silent when not in use. Why this feature hasn't been made available in desktops is beyond me. I can't see why load based fan speed control was ever so hard. I could never even control my stock sapphire
cooler with anything except afterburner and I still had to do it manually and half the time it didn't work. With my after market cooler I had to plug it into a fan header on my motherboard and that caused even more problems since it now didn't depend on the GPU temp and I had no (easy) way of ramping it myself. I have it set at 20% and I have to manually ramp it up to play a game (which happens rarely, but still)

Now that it's implemented widely as you guys seem to be aware of, why does it suck? I would think it fixes the decision of garbage card and fan-less or super card and jet engines.
 
Also thanks for those links! Just skimming over the reviews for the MSI is exactly what I was looking for. Most of the complaints are about the size of the MSI card and nothing about weird noises and I'm going to look around a bit more at the other cards as well. The reason I bring up the coil whine is that the reviews on more then one occasion mentioned coil whine on the Stryx. More times then can be considered a "fluke" or bad card. Newegg reviews, NCIX reviews and even a youtube review.

I know coil whine has in my view been this spectre that 15 years ago if you read about in forums most people would assume it was a bad device, not know what you were talking about or thought the people complaining about it were overly sensitive or insane and needed mental help.

Investigating coil whine back then, most manufacturers would state it was "normal" for their product while other equivalent products had no such noise and it drove me nuts. I would get replies like the first reply up in this thread. Now I see one of the criteria for PSUs on SPCR always mentions "electronic noise" or "coil whine" as part of their silence testing. In the case of the Stryx reviews on youtube mention it and even ASUS replied to one or two peoples complaints about changing power saving options and other "fixes" in response to issues in review pages. I do appreciate with less fan noise coil whine becomes more apparent if it exists and I think people and manufacturers are finally getting it.

I'm just glad us "coil whiners" have some credibility now, instead of being cast out into the woods like crazies :)
 
Having 0 DB is great when your sleeping. I just wish the rest of my PC would be 0 db as soon as my screen goes black from sleep mode.
 
I had a Gigabyte 960, the two fan model, that was really nice. Very quiet, has the passive fan feature up to certain temps as well, and zero coil whine. It's also one of the faster 960's. In one early review that compared several 960 models, the 2 fan version was actually faster than the 3 fan gaming edition. I don't remember the source of that review, though.

(I sold it because I had a different but similarly performing card, and the Gigabyte was the easier one to sell.)

I'd choose the Gigabyte over the ASUS, just because of the lack of support with ASUS.
 
I just started using my PC a lot more and not having a lot of fan based equipment in my room as I did before really makes it stand out. Granted it has a Noctua cooler, a Corsair PSU that the fan doesn't move in and an SSD it is quite silent. After having to replace the stock cooler on the 5850 because I killed it with BitCoin mining I replaced it with a 2 fan cheap-o aftermarket cooler and it hasn't been as quiet as I remember it. Others would probably say this PC is already fairly silent, but in a totally quiet room its really night and day.

I'm so glad these exist!

Am I to assume that the higher end models would have this feature now too? like the 980's? Also any experience with a step below the 960 or even AMDs equivalent with no noise?

Forgive my ineptitude, I've built this system quite a while ago and it works fine, but I haven't looked into Video Cards in years.
 
For a short time I had a gigabyte G1 GTX 960. It actually shuts down the fans when they're not necessary to run. I thought it was a good card overall. It was similar to what waderunner described.
 
0 dB thing is bad because your card runs without active cooling. Even if the card is not doing anything it is still clocked at low clock which still produces some heat. That heat reduces the life of your hardware since it is passively cooled.
A card that has contunous active cooling without load will be quiet since the fans will spein at minimal speed producing airflow and barely audible sound. Your hard drives will produce more noise at that point.
But that's just my 2 cents
 
0 dB thing is bad because your card runs without active cooling. Even if the card is not doing anything it is still clocked at low clock which still produces some heat. That heat reduces the life of your hardware since it is passively cooled.
A card that has contunous active cooling without load will be quiet since the fans will spein at minimal speed producing airflow and barely audible sound. Your hard drives will produce more noise at that point.
But that's just my 2 cents

^This +100.

A modern GPU which are already focused in a Quiet Operation by default, Running at 25%-30% fan speed its in all the way technically Silent and will provide a Fresh Environment to the card, because the GPU core isn't the only thing that should see, all the power circuitry, vRAM and VRMs will run hotter without any reason, so instead of a card that can idle at ~30C you will have a card that will idle at 40C-45C+ depending on the case airflow and ambient temperature which its have to be low basically mandatory.. this is the main reason why I'm completely opposed to 0dB/0RPM fans "feature".. a card running under heavy loads at 40-50% are actually rare even in high-end cards..
 
^This +100.

A modern GPU which are already focused in a Quiet Operation by default, Running at 25%-30% fan speed its in all the way technically Silent and will provide a Fresh Environment to the card, because the GPU core isn't the only thing that should see, all the power circuitry, vRAM and VRMs will run hotter without any reason, so instead of a card that can idle at ~30C you will have a card that will idle at 40C-45C+ depending on the case airflow and ambient temperature which its have to be low basically mandatory.. this is the main reason why I'm completely opposed to 0dB/0RPM fans "feature".. a card running under heavy loads at 40-50% are actually rare even in high-end cards..

You're wrong. For lower-power cards there's absolutely no issue.

I own an Asus Strix GTX 960, overclocked to 1630 core. This, along with my 2500k with Mugen 2, are silent enough that you can't hear ANYTHING when playing Valley plus PRIME95 looped for hours.

So I have experience in these things. I know how to make a PC silent while not letting the temperatures get too high (if they got too high the GPU fan would ramp-up), and to make the most of what little airflow I have.

After running Valley for 10 minutes at 59C, in just 5 minutes the GPU temperature has already dropped down to 31C, where it will stay no matter what I do. Videos, browsing, photo editing - it sticks at 31C, even with the fans completely off!

That's only TWO DEGREES HIGHER than my old GTX 460 1GB at idle (same case, same processor, and the two GPUs consume about the same power), which had a similar sized cooler that was always running. That's how little a difference it made!

The fact is that everyone already has enough airflow in their case, so these OFF fans only start to really affect temperatures when your have a gargantuan of a card (GTX 980 Ti, for example). For cards with 150w or less TDP, the idle power consumed is not going to be enough to be affecting idle temperatures.

But I can sorta see your complaint with the GTX 980 Ti.
 
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Also thanks for those links! Just skimming over the reviews for the MSI is exactly what I was looking for. Most of the complaints are about the size of the MSI card and nothing about weird noises and I'm going to look around a bit more at the other cards as well. The reason I bring up the coil whine is that the reviews on more then one occasion mentioned coil whine on the Stryx. More times then can be considered a "fluke" or bad card. Newegg reviews, NCIX reviews and even a youtube review.

I know coil whine has in my view been this spectre that 15 years ago if you read about in forums most people would assume it was a bad device, not know what you were talking about or thought the people complaining about it were overly sensitive or insane and needed mental help.

Investigating coil whine back then, most manufacturers would state it was "normal" for their product while other equivalent products had no such noise and it drove me nuts. I would get replies like the first reply up in this thread. Now I see one of the criteria for PSUs on SPCR always mentions "electronic noise" or "coil whine" as part of their silence testing. In the case of the Stryx reviews on youtube mention it and even ASUS replied to one or two peoples complaints about changing power saving options and other "fixes" in response to issues in review pages. I do appreciate with less fan noise coil whine becomes more apparent if it exists and I think people and manufacturers are finally getting it.

I'm just glad us "coil whiners" have some credibility now, instead of being cast out into the woods like crazies :)

If you're concerned about coil whine, check this Tom's Hardware test:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038-11.html

They capture the fan and coil noise, and take a look at the VRM designs to point out which are cheaply built.

I will say that it's a lot easier to have lower coil whine on lower-powered graphics cards. But VRM design also affects it.

My Asus STRIX GTX 960 has no coil whine.
 
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You're wrong. For lower-power cards there's absolutely no issue.

I own an Asus Strix GTX 960, overclocked to 1630 core. This, along with my 2500k with Mugen 2, are silent enough that you can't hear ANYTHING when playing Valley plus PRIME95 looped for hours.

So I have experience in these things. I know how to make a PC silent while not letting the temperatures get too high (if they got too high the GPU fan would ramp-up), and to make the most of what little airflow I have.

After running Valley for 10 minutes at 59C, in just 5 minutes the GPU temperature has already dropped down to 31C, where it will stay no matter what I do. Videos, browsing, photo editing - it sticks at 31C, even with the fans completely off!

That's only TWO DEGREES HIGHER than my old GTX 460 1GB at idle (same case, same processor, and the two GPUs consume about the same power), which had a similar sized cooler that was always running. That's how little a difference it made!

The fact is that everyone already has enough airflow in their case, so these OFF fans only start to really affect temperatures when your have a gargantuan of a card (GTX 980 Ti, for example). For cards with 150w or less TDP, the idle power consumed is not going to be enough to be affecting idle temperatures.

But I can sorta see your complaint with the GTX 980 Ti.

The point is, contunous airflow is better than no air flow aka passive cooling.
I've only had one passive air cooled thing in my life, which was an ATI card, don't remember the name, but I put an arctic cooling heatsink on it. Even at that point, I used some wire to have a 120mm fan hang off of it and provide active cooling.

Even low flow active cooling is better than passive cooling and that is why I am not sold on passive cooling. Yeah that active cooling will contribute 10db, bit you will not hear that.
And that is also why I will never own an macbook.
 
The point is, contunous airflow is better than no air flow aka passive cooling.
I've only had one passive air cooled thing in my life, which was an ATI card, don't remember the name, but I put an arctic cooling heatsink on it. Even at that point, I used some wire to have a 120mm fan hang off of it and provide active cooling.

Even low flow active cooling is better than passive cooling and that is why I am not sold on passive cooling. Yeah that active cooling will contribute 10db, bit you will not hear that.
And that is also why I will never own an macbook.

Yes and no. You need some airflow in a cabinet with the wattage a gaming system have, even midrange systems. But, some of the parts can be passive or semi-passive cooled.

My HTPC have a MSI GTX 980 gaming card and an Intel i5-4670K CPU in a small TJ08-E cabinet. I have replaced the 180mm front fan with a 140mm Noctua PWM fan, have no 120mm exhaust fan. Considered putting in a 120mm Nexus fan (SilentPCReviews reference fan), but there was no need. PSU is a semi-passive Fractal Design and draws air from the outside of the cabinet. CPU cooler is a Be quiet! Dark rock 3 with PWM controlled fan.

The GPU doesnt turn fan on until it has reached 69 degrees (celsius) and even in moderately taxing games, its off. On very taxing games, its on only for smaller periods of time and I have yet to hear the GPU over ambient, so it does it very quietly. 1080P resolution.

I am one of those that would sacrifice performance to get some lower noise levels, so I actively listen and tune my systems according to noise/performance ratio.
 
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