Pascal and the fully silent gaming PC?

[Quartz-1]

I'm sure I've long since bored many with my obsession over noise love of silence, but I've just found out about the HDPLEX H5. This is a fully fanless - and thus silent - gaming PC with a Nvidia GTX 960. Now, the GTX 960 isn't a high-end GPU, but I note that its TDP is only slightly less than the GTX 970, which was for a long time the best bang for the buck GPU. So I'm wondering how the TDPs of the Pascal GPUs are going to turn out. If past form holds true, the GTX 1060 will be roughly equivalent to the GTX 970, so if it's the same TDP as the 960, then a good gaming PC could be completely silent! And, just maybe, Nvidia will reduce the TDP of the 1070 sufficiently for it to work in this case.

I see interesting times ahead.

 

[Alkaladur]

I'm sure I've long since bored many with my obsession over noise love of silence, but I've just found out about the HDPLEX H5. This is a fully fanless - and thus silent - gaming PC with a Nvidia GTX 960. Now, the GTX 960 isn't a high-end GPU, but I note that its TDP is only slightly less than the GTX 970, which was for a long time the best bang for the buck GPU. So I'm wondering how the TDPs of the Pascal GPUs are going to turn out. If past form holds true, the GTX 1060 will be roughly equivalent to the GTX 970, so if it's the same TDP as the 960, then a good gaming PC could be completely silent! And, just maybe, Nvidia will reduce the TDP of the 1070 sufficiently for it to work in this case.

I see interesting times ahead.

Hm, I think it's going to be identical to the maxwell lineup. The 960 replacement will perform like a 970/980, it'll consume around 100w and could be passively cooled.

Don't forget however that passive cooling will influence gpu boost and end performance will be lower than it could be.

I can see an x70(gp104) being passively cooled, but at the cost of tdp and by extension clocks

 

[Quartz-1]

Yes, but remember that the system doesn't have to be a performance brute; it just has to be fast enough. Witness the recent lack of improvement in CPUs.

And I was playing Borderlands 2 with settings cranked without AA at 4K on a 780 Ti.

 

[Alkaladur]

Yes, but remember that the system doesn't have to be a performance brute; it just has to be fast enough. Witness the recent lack of improvement in CPUs.

And I was playing Borderlands 2 with settings cranked without AA at 4K on a 780 Ti.

Yeah, my point is just that you can passively cool anything really. You can passively cool a 980ti, it just won't run anywhere near 1200mhz; the only difference is a passively cooled 960 won't run *that much* worse than an active-cooled 960, but it also won't overclock half as well

 

[Quartz-1]

the only difference is a passively cooled 960 won't run *that much* worse than an active-cooled 960, but it also won't overclock half as well

I expect a passively cooled GPU to perform as well as the actively cooled GPU. But yes, overclocking is pretty much out.