As it happens, there is a spare passive 8600GT kicking about my house. Not only is an extra 20W (or whatever it would be) unpalatable on its own, it would also be annoying to have the two separate physical devices from the point of view of sharing GPU resources between them. I don't know how it work...

Glad my post's been some use. They seem to have made such good progress in idle power usage... then this. Bad. I'd like to know in simple terms what the differences between different manufacturers and models are... guess I'll have to do a bit more reading. I'm also going to measure the difference in...

Fire-Flare wrote:Are you asking from a power consumption view or fan noise?

Both. I find it unconscionable to be burning so much excess electricity on fancy GPU when I'm basically just editing some plain text documents in an IDE... and it's in those situations that I really want both quiet and two screens.

I've just read on bit-tech forums that nVidia GPUs run at full clock speed when running multiple displays... http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=202592 I haven't verified this in the cited doc, but have no reason to doubt it: It's in release notes, unfortunately. See page 29 : http://uk.down...

FWIW, my dad has an MSI GTX 460 Cyclone 768mb, and it's mildly audible under load but it is what I would consider 'quiet enough' for my needs... something similar would be ideal, but then again I think that is one of the quieter cards about... I see that Guru3d have some more testing of noise levels...

Thanks for the reply. I'm in no great rush; may order in the next couple of weeks. I may also be willing to install my own cooler if the benefits are tangible and the cost reasonable, but generally I'd rather have a decent stock cooler. Load power consumption could perhaps be better; heat doesn't lo...

Hello Forum, long term sporadic lurker among those shed in The Clearences :) I'm planning to put together a new system quite soon - hoping to get it reasonably quiet of course hence posting here, and will quite likely use a GTX 560 although this is not certain. As you may likely be aware, the card h...