What's the overall coolest running card?

Hiyruu said:
Currently.

For both Idle and Load.

Fans, not water.
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For gaming? Kinda need to know the use and what your budget is to get advise. The coolest card would be no card at all and using Intel on chip graphics :)
 
For gaming.. I have owned the 970 and the 980. Both ran very cool and quiet in multiple brands I tried. I really liked the MSI GTX 970. My Asus Strix GTX 980 runs cool and quiet but the heatsink doesn't fit very snug and gives it a cheap feeling.
 
Get a reference 980 would be my advise...if you have the coin the is
 
Before the fans died on me (after going for about 4 years), my trust MSI Geforce GTX 560 Ti (OC version) was pretty awesome. About 25C idle and barely 50C under intense gaming load. Crysis and all the rest, it chewed em up and spit it right back out. A very underrated card despite the 'low' number. Seems a lot of newer cards are benchmarked to actually perform worse than this one, who knew?
 
My Gigabyte 750ti twin fan runs at room temp at idle with the fans @ 50%.
 
As other people have said, the 970 and 980 are quite amazing cards. They have great power consumption ratings for their performance. As you most likely know, power consumption is directly comparable to the amount of heat they throw out.
 
Hiyruu said:
Currently.

For both Idle and Load.

Fans, not water.
Click to expand...

295X2 owners be like:

challenge-accepted-2.jpg
 
The EVGA GTX970 SSC ACX 2.0+ has an Accelero-like cooler on it, and it's programmed so the fans don't even come on until 60°C. While playing HotS at 1080p with the highest settings, the fans only spin up to about 350RPM to keep it in the low to mid 60's. I was quite impressed with how cool and quiet it was, but threw on my AIO cooler since I already had the parts.
 
I can't believe people are still recommending 970's with the broken memory system???

OP, we need a bit more info. At least give us the performance class or price range. Something?
 
What you actually looking to achieve? The coolest card in terms of what temperature it runs at idle and load by itself is basically meangingless.
 
Relayer said:
I can't believe people are still recommending 970's with the broken memory system???

OP, we need a bit more info. At least give us the performance class or price range. Something?
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thats because even with 3.5gig its still a great card, especially when doing power per watt or power per dollar.
 
"Coolest running" is a meaningless measure. It more comes down to how much heat your case can effectively dispense in your ambient environment - this would be an average wattage over time rather than instantaneous measuring of temperature. A 100w card with a bad heatsink could run at a higher temperature than a 200w card with good cooling.

Your purchase decision should come down to budget - but also consider if you need any auxiliary upgrades such as PSU or case to accommodate a new GPU.
 
A GTX 960 with non-reference cooler seems to be pretty cool running for the performance, though without any context of what performance\price range you're talking about its hard to say.
 
Relayer said:
I can't believe people are still recommending 970's with the broken memory system??
Click to expand...

currently, probably 90% of the people that use a GTX 970 don't need even 3GB of VRAM for their usage scenario, much less 3.5GB or 4GB. that's not to say that nVidia should get away with what they did, because they shouldn't...but the vast majority will be just fine with the card as-is, at least from a practical usage standpoint, the principle of the thing aside.

personally, i did switch from a 970 to a 980 because i was hitting the 3.5GB limit and it was causing problems, but for the stuff i used it for where i was under 3.5GB, it worked extremely well. and even after i found out about the VRAM issues that were causing my problems, i almost kept the card anyway and just adjusted my usage...but ultimately decided that i would be better served with a 980, not just from the VRAM standpoint, but because of the extra horsepower as well.

=======================================================================

anyway, i just got home from work and found that my EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Superclocked is a pretty damn good clocker.

Part Number: 04G-P4-2983-KR
--1266MHz Base Clock (stock)
--1367MHz Boost Clock (stock) - Actual loaded freq: 1404MHz
--7010MHz Memory Clock (stock) - 1752.5MHz x 4
-----------------------------------------------------
--1400MHz Base Clock (OC'ed)
--1501MHz Boost Clock (OC'ed) - Actual loaded freq: 1538MHz
--7600MHz Memory Clock (OC'ed) - 1900MHz x 4

this is at the stock 1.206v with fan manually set to 55% speed (not super-quiet, but also not really all that loud) and never getting over 60°C during the 16.5hrs that I let it run Furmark to burn-in. i did replace the stock thermal compound with some Antec Formula 5 thermal compound, so i'm sure that is probably helping some as well.

yesterday when i first installed the card, i was actually able to get it past 1600MHz boost (somewhere around 1627MHz - 1637MHz, i think), but that was at 100% fan speed (VERY loud), and with the voltage up to 1.256v. i think it was up around 73°C - 74°C and i didn't run a stress test on it to check for stability. not much point really, since i won't be running it that high 24x7 anyway.

still, the fact that this card can hit 1600MHz+ boost speed while staying below 75°C on AIR is absolutely amazing.

I haven't messed with trying to get the VRAM up to a higher speed yet, but even 1900MHz is +147MHz higher than the EVGA factory OC speed. i'm reasonably sure i can get it to somewhere between 2000MHz - 2100MHz stable.

i'll be tinkering around with it some more to see if i can get both the GPU & the VRAM speed up a little more, but will probably work harder on the VRAM speed than the GPU speed at this point.
 
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