Which brand is louder: AMD or Nvidia?

Z

Zan

Limp Gawd
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Oct 9, 2007
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Assuming the price range and performance are in similar brackets?
 
hmmm... sounds like a troll


that being said if you put fans at 40% on either vendor they should both provide enough cooling without being very loud
 
It probably varies from market segment to market segment. If you give us a particular performance range that you'd like we might be able to find you something particularly quiet, but otherwise your question is pretty hard to answer.
 
The new ATI stuff is pretty quiet IMO. With the new power functionality I think they'd be tough to beat (I won't buy anything else right now).
 
I've found the AMD cards to be louder than their NVIDIA counterparts as of late. I haven't personally used one of the newer AMD cards so I can't speak to them but the 4870 X2 was horrible to be around. Just one of those is louder than my Geforce GTX 280 OC 3-Way SLI setup is.
 
Depends entirely on the series of the GPU and the cooling solution used.

For example the reference 48xx series was pretty loud in general.
 
My current two builds, one has HD4870 in crossfire and other has GTX260 in SLI. The ATI cards are a louder at idle and a lot louder under load than the nVidia cards. Fan controls on the nVidia seems to work very well, only spinning up when it should. The fans on the ATI cards seem to have a mind of their own and will spin up to full speed when idling at the desktop.
 
I need a video card for gaming. The rig will not have any type of exotic cooling. The rig will only have one video card. My budget is around 200 dollars.
 
my asus 5850 really is the most quiet video card ive ever owned / this is coming from a 8800 and that was coming from a x800xl and that was coming from a 6600gt and i cant remember back before that

but the 5850 never spins up... my ambient is around 68f or so and in crysis at 3600x1600 i never hear the fan spin up on my card...

when i check the temps they arent far off idle

i heat my computer room separately from the rest of the house / the only time i did hear it ramp up is when id left the vent open / and the house heat and my room heater were on...

id imagine ambient was up in the high 70's - the room vent is right next to my computer (which is why i have it closed) so i was basically blowing heat directly across my computer

i heard it spin up then, sounded like every other video card ive ever had when the fans are doing their jobs...

but at idle and in game / my 5850 cant be heard over the silent 120's in my case
 
Back in the old days the ATI cards I had were the loudest in terms of fan noise and various electrical sounds. These days the noise levels seem pretty consistent.
 
This is a deciding factor for me.

I went from a 4870 to a GTX 260 and big difference in both idle and load fan noise, so I kept the GTX.

Are 5xxx really quiet now ?
 
yes 5870 is more quiet and saves more power at 2d than the gtx 260 that i threw out of the window.
 
To me this only matters at idle. In game the game sounds are loud enough to drown out pretty much any fan noise. Unless you're trying to set up a folding farm, which you'll want NVIDIA for anyway, you pretty much shouldn't care. They're both damn near inaudible at idle.

Several years back I went with an x800 over a 6800 because when I tested both they performed close enough to equal that the quieter idle of the x800 was a defining advantage.
 
The question is legit. I have hearing loss and background noise makes the problem worse.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Juic3 said:
This is a deciding factor for me.

I went from a 4870 to a GTX 260 and big difference in both idle and load fan noise, so I kept the GTX.

Are 5xxx really quiet now ?
Click to expand...

I just replaced my 8800GTS with a 5870. I left the fan on auto and it is pretty quiet, I was amazed at how low this card idled. It runs the fan at 24% and the GPU is a 50c idle. I played Crysis for about and hour last night and the fan never spun up past 33% and the GPU stayed around 75c. At 33% I could not hear it over my case fans or the game.

My case is a p180
Case fans are Nexus 120's
 
friend'scatdied said:
Depends entirely on the series of the GPU and the cooling solution used.

For example the reference 48xx series was pretty loud in general.
Click to expand...

The 4850 was very quiet - it got slammed for not spinning up the fan sooner. I assume the 4830 is largely the same way.

But really it doesn't matter if its AMD or NVidia - both companies are bound by the laws of thermodynamics. The more heat the card produces, the louder it will be (more or less). If noise is really a concern an after market cooler could always be used or a non-reference card. XFX will still honor the card's warranty even if you swap coolers.
 
AFAIK only the 58xx and 5970 have heatpipes. The 57xx reference has a standard copper block and gets pretty loud (smaller fan that spins faster at all times).

I went from the 5770 to the 5850 and I thought the premium was worth it for the higher-quality cooling alone, let alone the silence.
 
From reading the forums, I get the impression that ATi cards are generally louder than nVidia.
In constrast a lot of the 'my card is quiet' comments seem to be more nVidia.

I haven't owned an ATi card since a X1900XT but that thing was NOT QUIET to say the least.
 
as has been said a thousand times
entirely depends on the cards in question

there are stock/aftermarket/3rd party solutions for either that are silent or near silent
and there are stock/aftermarket/3rd party solutions for either that might as well be a dust buster

what a dramatically over-generalized thread indeed
 
I woudn't put a whole lot in the tweaktown results. 2 CM is too close to the cards to really get a good measurement and sound can really change at that range with positioning. In recent years, both ATI and Nvidia have reduced the noise levels considerably. Of the three high end video cards I have had in the past few years, the 640mb 8800 GTS, 9800 GTX+, and ATI 5870, none of them have been very audible inside a case while idling. (While gaming it is hard to hear them over the speakers) :D The video cards that seem to make the most noise for me have been some of the lower end single slot cards with small fans and heatsinks like the 8500GT and 9500GT.
 
Like everyone has said it will really depend on the card. I even had two PNY 9600gts (same model number) that were completely different. One was very quiet, the other very loud. PNY changed the PCB and cooler. I now have a XFX 5770 with the egg cooler and it is as quiet if not quieter than the quiet 9600gt.
 
I've yet to come across ANY card that I would consider quiet at stock. I just recently built a PC for a friend with a GTX260 (216) and I had to modify the bios to tweak the Fan IC settings to something acceptable at idle.

If you in any way care about noise then you should immediately be looking at 3rd party after market coolers.

Personally I won't buy a new card until there's a waterblock for it at a reasonable price.
 
looking at the Tom's link (which says its at 1 meter, I'm inclined to prefer that to the tweaktown results) they're going to be about the same, and here's why:

the loudest recorded output on the Tom's link is something like 48 dB, the quietest is around 43 dB (we're ignoring idles for right now), now dB's aren't a linear scale, they're a log scale, to double acoustic energy requires an increase of 3 dB (so 9 dB has twice as much energy as 6 dB), however to double perceptual loudness (as in, what we as humans would say is twice as loud) requires something like 10 dB (recently another member used the figure 6 dB, which I like as a decent midline because it makes things clean, and their defense of said # was very solid,so we could use that too)

so looking at 43 dB vs 48 dB, thats 5 dB of difference, it may be perceptible as slightly louder, however it will be nowhere near "Twice" as loud

idle outputs seem to range between around 37.5 dB and 40 dB, even closer together (there isn't even a 3dB delta between the loudest and quietest cards)

so generally speaking, based on those results, there shouldn't be much audible difference

NOW, the part of this that Tom's didn't take into account, is at what frequency this noise is, see here for why that matters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

theres a lot of other variables that aren't taken into account by the Tom's test vs what you or I will have in our homes, so while the Tom's test could be argued as objective/correct (the only thing being changed is the graphics card being measured), it doesn't take into account things like room acoustics, case cooling, ambient temperature at user's location, overclocking/underclocking, etc


good info, and it really can help someone make a decision (if something were dramatically louder than the rest, say if a board was posting 60 dB at 1 M in that test) between a few boards or cooling designs, but I don't think that we can definitively say "this will be louder than that" without some qualifications (for example larger diameter fans may be perceived as quieter, passive solutions are silent, noise insulated cases change things dramatically, etc)
 
5db is around 55% louder. As far as noise level, it depends on the frequency and pitch as well. The closer to the midrange frequencies, the more sensitive our hearing is. If it's a low frequency hum its more benign.
 
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