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.

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

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. ;)

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!