samuelmorris
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2010
- Messages
- 5,506
Syphon Filter: I assume you've determined it's the graphics cards making the noise? It's entirely possible with a complete new build for another component to be producing noise you weren't expecting.
Geck0: At the risk of responding to what almost seems like a trollpost, as I've stated elsewhere, until the replacement of the 3008WFP with a UP3214Q, this was enough power to run quite a lot of games. I could run Battlefield 3 at 2560x1600 with most of the detail settings high (admittedly not all of them), and Borderlands 2 ran fine on mostly high settings, as did Bioshock Infinite. Given that the pair of HD6970s was fairly reliable and quiet, I had no reason to upgrade them. Disregarding how affluent you think people may be for their hardware purchases, in my case I really want to see a substantial performance benefit before making a significant upgrade. Until the arrival of the 290 series, there was nothing really that provided a big enough performance boost that warranted spending that much money. Now that the 290s have arrived, I'm still not convinced simply because I don't want to return to the days of having a PC that makes a daft amount of noise, heats my room up considerably (it's a small room) and is potentially going to have heat problems a couple of years down the line and force me to upgrade again.
As I stated, the HD4870X2 that had the issues (one was worse than the other, perhaps unsurprisingly) was given a thorough cleanout from the outside, so the airflow area was clear from any dust. Still at 100% fan speed it got sufficiently hot to throttle back eventually, when I sold it to someone with a worse-ventilated case than mine. In my PC it ran fine, but the fan was running around 90-95% in games on auto, and just about keeping the temps in the high 80s, which was about 5200rpm, crazy loud (considering the other card was still running fairly fast around 4000 odd).
Replacing TIM on a card being necessary before it is obsoletised, just to keep it running, never mind about it being quieter/cooler, is definitely not normal. If given basic attention to reduce dust periodically, a graphics card should be engineered well enough to run until it's well and truly outdated. My HD6970s are 3 years old in 4 weeks, and they're also caked in dust at the moment. I'll need to clean them out at some point, but no urgency, because they're not overheating and they're not getting particularly loud either, unless I run a litecoin miner. It may not bother the people who upgrade every generation, or who run max fan speeds as a matter of principle and have zero care about fan noise, but really, for the majority, I think the 290X and to a lesser extent the 290 are going to become seriously difficult to live with in 18 months time.
Geck0: At the risk of responding to what almost seems like a trollpost, as I've stated elsewhere, until the replacement of the 3008WFP with a UP3214Q, this was enough power to run quite a lot of games. I could run Battlefield 3 at 2560x1600 with most of the detail settings high (admittedly not all of them), and Borderlands 2 ran fine on mostly high settings, as did Bioshock Infinite. Given that the pair of HD6970s was fairly reliable and quiet, I had no reason to upgrade them. Disregarding how affluent you think people may be for their hardware purchases, in my case I really want to see a substantial performance benefit before making a significant upgrade. Until the arrival of the 290 series, there was nothing really that provided a big enough performance boost that warranted spending that much money. Now that the 290s have arrived, I'm still not convinced simply because I don't want to return to the days of having a PC that makes a daft amount of noise, heats my room up considerably (it's a small room) and is potentially going to have heat problems a couple of years down the line and force me to upgrade again.
As I stated, the HD4870X2 that had the issues (one was worse than the other, perhaps unsurprisingly) was given a thorough cleanout from the outside, so the airflow area was clear from any dust. Still at 100% fan speed it got sufficiently hot to throttle back eventually, when I sold it to someone with a worse-ventilated case than mine. In my PC it ran fine, but the fan was running around 90-95% in games on auto, and just about keeping the temps in the high 80s, which was about 5200rpm, crazy loud (considering the other card was still running fairly fast around 4000 odd).
Replacing TIM on a card being necessary before it is obsoletised, just to keep it running, never mind about it being quieter/cooler, is definitely not normal. If given basic attention to reduce dust periodically, a graphics card should be engineered well enough to run until it's well and truly outdated. My HD6970s are 3 years old in 4 weeks, and they're also caked in dust at the moment. I'll need to clean them out at some point, but no urgency, because they're not overheating and they're not getting particularly loud either, unless I run a litecoin miner. It may not bother the people who upgrade every generation, or who run max fan speeds as a matter of principle and have zero care about fan noise, but really, for the majority, I think the 290X and to a lesser extent the 290 are going to become seriously difficult to live with in 18 months time.