High End Silent Cooling For Graphics Cards

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."

Comments

What would excite me is a lower price

[amichalo]

I must be the only one out there but instead of the fancy packaging, colored circuit bords, flashing lights, included CD's filled with shareware games, and ... as of this article ... cooling devices fit for the Red October, I would like a graphics card that ...

IS IN EXPENSIVE!

Imagine that graphics card marketing departments. Keep your fluff and give me a lower cost card!

Of other note, a card shardard for laptops so I could upgrade my PowerBook G4 would be huge for me, expecially as laptops become the PC of choice for the younger, more mobile 20 somethings.

Re:What would excite me is a lower price

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is news?

[worst_name_ever]

I could already have told you that pipe technology greatly enhances enjoyment of the pretty colors and swirly lights so common in today's high-end games.

Re:silent fans but noisy games....

[rokzy]

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

Nothing to see here

[bahamat]

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.

What about the rest of the computer?

[gagy]

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.

For DIYers on a budget

[johnny6vasquez]

The sound was driving me crazy one day so I got out the hacksaw.

Just take any old stock AMD or P4 heatsink and chop it in half. I didn't have proper heatsink fasteners on my card so drilled it out and zip tied it down. The bottom is still smooth and the paste was properly applied.

The only problem was getting the stock fan off as it was glued on. I put my card in a ziplock bag
and chucked it in the freezer for half an hour. Then I used a screwdriver to pry off the fan assembly (with an old library card to protect the pcb).

Check it out (it's not a swiss watch but it gets the job done).

Pic 1: http://fullcircletraining.com/images/quiet1.jpg

Pic 2: http://fullcircletraining.com/images/quiet2.jpg

You can see I did the same thing to the northbridge on the motherboard.

happy modding.
j.

virtually silent?

[verbatim_verbose]

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. ;)

Fan reliability

[BWJones]

The other issue we are going to be having is fan reliability. In servers, we can tell if fans go bad through notification. However, when the fan on my GeForceTi gave up the ghost last week, I only knew about it because I was in the case adding a card. With the proliferation of fans in computers, I would like to see either 1) built in software checks to identify fan status, or 2) more efficient passive cooling techniques that don't require fans. Having a truly silent PC on your desk is pretty nice as illustrated by the Apple Cube connected to a flat panel. Totally silent as opposed to my other workstations (Apple included).

The real future

[Gossy]

This is where it's really at.

http://www.directron.com/fanless.html

It's a Zalman case that is coming soon. It will cost a lot - but the entire case acts as a big heatsink. They claim it can easily cool the hottest GPU & CPU's out there, assuming your PC room isn't a furnace, I presume. :)

Here's a japanese link verifying Zalman as the people behind it. http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20030 712/etc_tnn500a.html

This is the holy grail for silent computing enthusiasts!

Re:Let's get serious on quiet

[Simon]

Have you tried suspending your drives? It can be done cheaply and makes a big difference.

There are some good drives these days that are very quiet. Seagate Barracuda series drives are legendary among the Quiet PC crowd. Although other manufacturers are also bringing out quiet drives.

If you really want a silent computer you might as well get some information:

How to Quiet the Thing
Silent PC Review

--
Simon

Re:Typical lifespan?

[Simon]

Does anyone know how long the typical lifespan of such a heatsink is? Would it survive longer than a typical fan-based heatsink? I run my boxes 24x7 and it seems that in a dusty environment - such as my appartment - all fans need to be replaced every year or so.

I think you just answered your own question. :-) In my experiance fans are _the_ most unreliable components in my systems. I'm using quality fans now and I've replace all fans on my GFX cards with heatsinks.

I imagine that a heat pipe would last much much longer than any fan. For a start they have almost no moving parts (well, no fiction really), and most of all no _exposed_ moving parts. (The pipe contains a liquid that moves/pumps heat by changing to a gas and back again.)

--
Simon

On the Subject of Sapphire Cards

[luekj]

I recently purchased a Sapphire 9700;

It may have not come with a fancy heavy heat sink, but it sure heated up to the point of automatic self-destruction pretty well without much prompting from myself. Needless to say, it was pretty dissapointing.

When I got the replacement in the mail I had to cool it with a smaller house fan until I went out and purchased a pci fan and placed it RIGHT NEXT to it.

So, no wonder they're pushing these big cooling rigs.......