Haven't been on here in years, but just wanted to chime in on the EVGA 1070 FTW. My first video card upgrade in five years and I am really disappointed in it. The quality control in these is atrocious. I've tried THREE brand new cards now and all three have been more or less the same. The fans are ...

I have had the Define XL R2 for around a year now and really love it.

It had issues--I had to contact fractal to get longer motherboard standoffs, and the stock "Silent" series fans are crap, even at 5v. But with Noctua P14s all round at 5v, I never hear my computer anymore.

If the 14cm fans that came with my Define XL R2 are any indication, the Fractal fans are bad at any voltage. So whatever you pick should be an improvement. However, are you sure you really need a side intake? I've never found them to be much use (in my experience -- I've never done SLI/Crossfire). T...

I had a single WD Red 2 TB mounted in elastic suspension, but once everything else in my system was really silenced (I'm down to three 14cm Noctua fans at 5v in a Define XL R2) the drive started to annoy me with its noise. I swapped it out for one of the Samsung F4s that I had been using for backup,...

The idle results are brilliant, the fan will even turn itself off when the GPU idles. There are some SPCR forum member that are going for it, maybe one of the could confirm this. I have the MSI Gaming N760 and have yet to see the fans switch off at idle. The min value reported by Hardware Monitor i...

I would second the MSI. I recently bought the Gaming series 760, which has the same cooler as the 770. It is inaudible at idle in a Fractal Define XL R2 with two Noctua 140mm fans running at 5v. If I try to hear the GPU under a heavy load, I can just make it out in a silent room with my head close t...

I've had three Ultrasharps (a 2211 and two 2412s) and never noticed any sound from them. I'm pretty sensitive to coil whine and related high pitch noises too. I'm also in the process of trying to get a good U2713HM. I've been sent four monitor so far and they all have had backlight bleed and pixel d...

Thanks for the replies, gents. I've also heard quite a few other positive comments about the cooler on the MSI Gaming lineup, which also comes on other 700-series cards. I used to have a DCII 670, which was wonderfully quiet, but I sold that and added a Sapphire 7950 because I was into mining bitcoi...

Much has been made of the improvement in the quality of the fans/cooler on the GTX 780 and Titan.

Can anyone comment on whether they're up to SPCR standards (for idling at least)?

I'm not sure what it is that's making the remaining electrical noise. It could very well be PSU or graphics card. It's so faint that I can't localize it, and like I said I have to put my ear to the case to notice it. All I can hear now from my seating position is a *very* gentle wooshing from my 7v ...

I splurged and got the P8Z77-V Pro. I can happily report that it's a lot quieter than the ASRock board. There's still a very quiet electrical noise coming from my machine, but it's so faint I can only hear it with my ear beside the case. This motherboard feels so much more sturdy than the Extreme4. ...

Sounds like Asus is a good bet then. I guess I should have stuck with them in the first place. I'd just heard so many good things about ASRock lately.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I just got an ASRock Z77 Extreme4 and RMA'd it because of a faint (but quite audible over my 7v Nexus 120s) high pitch coil whine. The replacement board they sent me exhibits the same problem... so it seems the whine is a feature, not a bug. I know it's the board because the system was working very ...

I have a Sandy Bridge G620 with a Noctua NH-C12P that's running fanless in a Silverstone GD05 with Nexus 120mm case fans at 5v. Last I tested it, it didn't get above the low 50s running Intel Burn Test. Those cases have really good airflow to the CPU area. The NH-C12P is not cheap by any means, but ...

I have the Asus 670 DCII and can report that it's quieter at idle than Nexus 120s at 7v. Subjective assessment, of course.

Interesting to hear confirmation of the tonal noise of the higher RPM Gentle Typhoons. I currently have two of these sitting idle in my box o' fans for this very reason. One of these is the 1850 RPM mentioned in the article, but the other is an 1150, which unfortunately exhibits the ringing tone whe...

I would listen to the system with the case open and easily accessible in order to try and pinpoint where the noise is coming from. You might want to use a cardboard tube (such as from an empty paper towel roll) up to your ear to help determine the source of the noise. Motherboards also have coils t...

I'm experiencing a piercing high pitch noise from my system. As I quiet fans and hard drives better, it becomes more and more annoying. Possible culprits: CPU - loading the CPU with Prime95 or IntelBurnTest has no effect GPU - replaced a 6950 with a 670 and the noise remained exactly the same. I do ...

I picked up the regular Asus 670 DCII (non-TOP) from Newegg. I'll be posting here with my impressions once it arrives and I get it installed. I'm currently using a 6970 with AC Twin Turbo II (stock fan assembly replaced by two Scythe Kama Flow 92mm fans), so I will be comparing it to a pretty quiet ...

Looks like major retailers got some stock of the Asus cards today. Newegg.ca and NCIX are both showing availability in Canada, and, I assume, the US.

Oh my poor wallet. This is so tempting.

Is it hard to flash the BIOS on the Gigabyte card? I have the Gigabyte GTX560 Ti non-OC, and the minimum clock speed isn't low enough for me (I think it's set to 40%). To answer the OP - I have the dual-fan version: it's quiet at idle (barely audible), but I can definitely single out the fan noise ...

I'd say you definitely don't need the quad core if you're only doing 1080p and Office. You could compromise and go with the A6 (tri core), which would give you a bit of extra muscle just in case. The C12P should be compatible with FM1--AFAIK FM1 uses exactly the same mounting system as AM2, AM2+, a...

Which heatsink/cpu fan would you suggest? Because the Noctua NH-C12P isn't compatible with the FM1 socket. I have found some good reviews of the Noctua NH-L12, but I don't know if it the heatsink is better than the one on the Big Shuriken? It works with a fan, a heatsink and another fan. In the rev...

In my GD05 I use a Noctua NH-C12P with no fan and it idles in the mid 30s and gets up to the low 50s under Prime95 torture test. This is with Nexus fans at 5v (more or less identical results and noise levels with the stock fans at 5v). Of course, the Noctua is a much better/beefier HSF than the Big ...

I switched from a Sapphire HD6950 with TR Shaman ( stock fan, running at ~730 RPM all the time ) to the new ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU II and I must say the ASUS is quite close in noise levels to the Shaman. At idle they sound very similar to me, but at heavy load the ASUS is just a bit louder ( I can f...

The fans that come with the GD05 are really quite decent. I replaced mine with Nexuses, and honestly I didn't notice a difference; I wish I'd just saved my money. You can get a cheap PCI slot fan controller ($5) and dial them down to 5v.

Any update on this? I have an eerily similar system to the OP's and also am getting coil whine whose source is hard to track down. I never noticed it till I put in the current video card, so I'm assuming it's that, but it could be something else too: I have been doing a lot to silence my system late...

OK, now I know there's something weird going on electrically with my case or with the fan controller. I was monkeying around with the fans, plugging and unplugging them, and accidentally touched some exposed y-splitter pins to the chassis. Sparkles! Computer stable though (of course it was on while ...

Now it seems that the other P14 is also ticking. Much more quietly but it's there. Maybe they've always ticked but I haven't noticed it? I recently installed aftermarket GPU cooling; perhaps my stock graphics card has been drowning out the ticking of these P14s. Could the fan controller be somehow r...

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll try giving my ticking fans a good tapping and see if they get better. In the mean time, I've gone down to one fan (between the heatsinks) on my D14 and it doesn't make much difference in temps. I'm still hovering in the mid-60s under IBT w/AVX (4.5GHz, 1.3v), so I ...