SPCR

Hi,

can someone recommend, out of his personal experience, a quiet mid-range card? I'd like to get a 7850 or 660 or 7870, if I can't find one, I would resort to the MSI GTX 650ti, which is reported to be quiet, but hasn't enough performance for me.

Regards

What do you intend to do with it? What OS are you running and how quiet do you need it? If passive then an aftermarket cooling solution is the only real solution regardless of card in this segment.

My Sapphire 7950 (dual fan cooler with Boost) proved to be as quiet as reviews portrayed it to be, so I'd bet their 7850 is as good. Using their own tweaker software or MSI Afterburner would let you adjust the fan curve as well. Minimum fan speed on this card is 1150 RPM which I cannot hear from outside the case. The card runs so cool they could have had a much lower RPM floor, but unfortunately graphics card fan controllers just aren't made that way.

OS will be Win8, for the time being, the most demanding task for the card will be WoW which, in its current version and with highest settings, actually is a challenge for the 650 ti, and I'd like to have some reserve performance. But noise is more important, if I can't find a quiet higher performance card, I will settle for the MSI 650.

The card has to be absolutely silent in office mode and as quiet as possible under high load.

Video card review compilation.

Look at MSI GTX 660 or Asus.

Thanks for the responses.

@ CA_Steve: Would you go with the MSI or the Asus? If Asus: The GTX660-DC2-2GD5 or the OC version GTX660-DC2T-2GD5? What do you think about this fan setting for the MSI: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=64617&p=567840#p567840

At stock profile, Asus might be quieter, MSI might run cooler. I like MSI's VRM cooling. As for stock or OC, that's up to you to decide after reading the tons of gaming benchmarks at your given screen resolution / quality settings for WoW. If they don't have WoW, look for Starcraft II benchmarks and then add another 25-50% to the fps for WoW equivalent. WoW really isn't that GPU intensive. I was getting decent framerates at 1080p with an old HD 5770 (HD 7750 equivalent. Are you sure you aren't CPU limited? What's your CPU?

Probably stock clock will allow for a slightly quieter fan setting, the heatsink construction seems to be the same for both oc and stock.

CPU will be a i5 3470.

Did you test WoW with your 7750 equivalent at highest settings in the current MoP? If so, then the MSI 650 ti might be sufficient, and that should be the quietest solution.

My last WoW play was Cata. Here's Tom's Hardware MoP beta results. I wouldn't bother with the Ultra settings - don't know if they really are worth it.

If you aren't gpu-limited, WoW tends to scale fps linearly with CPU clock freq up to ~ 3GHz...maybe a little more. It only uses 2 cores, so the i5-3470 is a cakewalk for it.

My Gigabyte 660 Windforce (note: non-ti) is pretty damned quiet. When you boot up, the fans default to 50% speed, but once you get into windows, they drop down to 30% speed, about 900RPM from what I can deduce. Completely inaudible to me unless I have my ear right up to the graphics card, or if I game into the early hours of the morning, I can faintly make out the fan noise. Even then they've got a smooth character to them.