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High End Silent Cooling For Graphics Cards

Posted by michael on from the look-ma-no-fans dept.

SpinnerBait writes "With all the competition these days in the 3D Accelerator market, Graphics Card OEMs are doing anything they can to differentiate their products in a sea of competitive solutions. Recently board designs are getting even more exotic, with brightly colored PCBs, high end heat sink and fan combinations and even flashing lights for the case modders out there. However, a relatively new trend is Quiet Computing. HotHardware has an article up that showcases two new Radeon 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro cards from Sapphire Tech, that have rather impressive fanless coolers on them that are virtually silent. Great stuff for those of you gaming in the library."

5 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:silent fans but noisy games.... by rokzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the problem with noisy graphics cards isn't the noise they make during noisy games, it's the noise they make the other 99.8% of the time

  2. Nothing to see here by bahamat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No big news. All they did was take a Zalman vga cooler and package it with the card.

    The only thing that really makes this significant, is that if it comes with the card you can't void your warranty by placing something "too heavy" on it.

  3. What about the rest of the computer? by gagy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been sleeping next to noisy computers for most of my life. Back in the BBS era I'd have things download overnight, so I'm rather used to to all the noise. But if I was overly concerned with the noise, I wouldn't really care about the vid. card. There are much noisier components in a system, mainly the powersupply and some hard drives can be quite loud. People are now installing two or three case fans as well, adding to the cunundrum. I really don't think that adding one more noisy object to the mix would change things.

    I know that some people spend their fortunes on quiet powersupplies and sound insulation and these cards might be what they're looking for, but for the most part they're a small nieche market.

    --
    -I DDoSed your mom.
  4. Re:What would excite me is a lower price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Prices are never going to get cheaper. Lowest performing card(for gaming crowd) will be <$75(Radeon9200, GF4-MX) Entry-level cards will always be $75-125(Radeon9500, GF4-Ti4200). Highest end will always be $300-400(Radeon9800, GF-FX). (Will increase due to inflation obviously).

    Why? The chipset designers(ati/nV) try to create one entry for each segment without too much overlap WRT pricing and performace between segments. No one is going to produce cards with older technology when they can use that manufacturing capacity to build other, newer, more profitable cards. Once production has ramped up it never gets cheaper to produce the cards. It does not cost any more to produce a top end card today than it would be to build a Voodoo3.

  5. virtually silent? by verbatim_verbose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Huh... virtually silent? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how a large block of aluminum can be anything more than completely silent. ;)