SPCR

I have a BFG 7800 GTX. I put it in just to see how loudit was with the stock cooler, and to my amazement this thing is dead quiet, its quieter than my zalman VF700. Now I know I must be doing something wrong here because I just can't believe its this quiet. I even fired up BF2 last night for about 2 hours and it still didn't go any higher. Am I missing something here?


falcon26

You better check that thing out by keeping an eye on the fan when some heavy 3D app is running; my BFG's fan kicks in quite clearly during 3D load.

-Ed

I'll do that. I just finished playing BF2 for about an hour and it was still dead quiet, I checked the temps of the card and it was about 70C


falcon26

lol well, 70 C is getting close to being permanently dead quiet !

eh might be ok I guess. bf2 does max out things right?

I would kill for 70c for temps. After about 20 min of running rthdribl with my 6800gt my temps are in the low 90s and I am running everything stock.

Are you maxing out quality and resolution? Or just playing @ 1024x768? Did you get any fps numbers?

falcon26 wrote:I'll do that. I just finished playing BF2 for about an hour and it was still dead quiet, I checked the temps of the card and it was about 70C

Actually I'm just playing at 1024x768 with all the settings set to max. My vision sucks so playing anything higher than that I can't see crap. Maybe that's why its always cool. I was getting about 70+ frames a second.


falcon26

Are you sure it's silent? I mean, I don't own one (I have 6800GT), but judging from the stock cooler's design I have doubts about its silence. But maybe I am wrong. Oh, and the stock cooler doesn't cool very well. My temps get into the low 90's also, and I often see bizzare artifacts. Later I decided to watercool everything, and my card never reached above 45C. A huge difference. =)

Has anyone heard whether Arctic Cooling will put out a compatible Silencer for the 7800's? (I read that a new Asus 7800 has one right out of the box). I also have a BFG and it is a great card (and fairly quiet), but I wouldn't mind making it quieter!

iowastate89 wrote:Has anyone heard whether Arctic Cooling will put out a compatible Silencer for the 7800's? (I read that a new Asus 7800 has one right out of the box).

Same here, my MSI 7800GTX is pretty quiet, but does have a higher-pitched noise than my other fans, so it is noticable. Also, I'm sure it'd help my temps if I could get that hot GPU air blown right out of the case instead of just circulating it around inside.

iowastate89 wrote:Has anyone heard whether Arctic Cooling will put out a compatible Silencer for the 7800's? (I read that a new Asus 7800 has one right out of the box).

According to the Arctic Cooling site the Asus card is running a NV Silencer 5, so I would think that the NV Silencer 5's are compatible, unless Asus custom made their card to fit the NV 5.

From Arctic Cooling's web site:

The NV Silencer 5 is basically compatible to the NVIDIA 7800 series boards except the power plug. You can take the power from the VGA board with connecting the black and red wire or you get the power from the PSU directly. Best is you buy a Y-cable for the 5.25" power cables, cut o­ne plug of it and connect black with black and red (VGA) with yellow (PSU) in order to get 12V. Remove the isolation of the cables and twist them into each other, then isolate it with tape.

erikt

~El~Jefe~ wrote:lol well, 70 C is getting close to being permanently dead quiet !

eh might be ok I guess. bf2 does max out things right?

Not even close. The throtling doesn't even kick in to around 115C. Current gen video cards can run much hotter than cpus.

That said, my eVGA 7800GT is not 'silent'. Not as loud as my X850 XT PE was but it is definatly louder than what most here would consider acceptable. Also, thermal stasis is supposed to be releasing thier 7800 seriers cooling stuff soon. I'm looking forward to it.

any other SPCR'ers with an opinion and this card? i sold my silentpipe x800xl in principle today in order to build my new system.

I have just read this review of the big dog from Asus and think they have a winner.
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... =3&id=1688

FTA: "ASUS claims that there would not be any installation problems using the Extreme N7800 GTX in an SLI rig due to its size. The catch is that the SLI motherboard must be an ASUS board too. As our test system is coincidentally based on an ASUS SLI motherboard, we did not encounter any problems with it. However, since double slot cards have been in the market for a while, most SLI motherboards should have the physical allowance for this card (albeit it would be a tight fit other than the ASUS SLI motherboards)."

Hmm... that isn't good. Compared to my "still haven't installed yet opened" Gigabyte GA-K8N the Asus has two smaller PCI-e connectors between their 16x slots, where as I only have one.

Perhaps I should have waited till now to buy, or ASUS should have hauled more ass getting their passive solution out.

My BFG 7800GT is loud. It is the loudest component in my system. I wish there were a software control to quiet it down. I am thinking about returning it, but since I got such a good deal I would like to keep it and figure out a way to cool it passively. During full load it only goes up to 72C and idles around 42C which seems pretty good. Maybe Zalman will make a nice quiet cooling fanless HS. Oh, my Dell case has a car support on both sides so the HS can't go outside the boundary of the physical graphics card...

My EVGA 7800 GTX KO ACS³ is actually pretty damn quiet... the NForce4Pro heatsink fans are what make all of the noise for me...

And the KO is fast as hell, but runs cooler than the "lower end" EVGA 7800 (can you call such an expensive card "lower end?").

Temp maxes at 65c after playing an hour or so of Doom3, HL2 or Far Cry at 1920x1200 with all the settings maxed out.

Gotta quiet thos other fans

The air cooled 7800gtx temps you guys are posting is making me feel a lot better about my 58 degree peak load with my Reserator 1 with the new Zalman VGA cooler. I had been wondering how it stacked up but I took the stock air cooler off before installation. Anyone notice the trip level temp in the cards software is 115C ??!!??!!

Edward Ng wrote:You better check that thing out by keeping an eye on the fan when some heavy 3D app is running; my BFG's fan kicks in quite clearly during 3D load.

-Ed

Ed, is your BFG card a Geforce 7800 GTX? While BFG is selling the GeForce 7800 GTX, assumptions based on their previous cards don't apply as Nvidia didn't give them enough time to deviate from the reference design.

While I've heard that the Geforce 7800 GTX is quiet, I didn't didn't imagine it to be silent (as everyone who said so shouldn't have good hearing as a consequence of their choice of computer parts). It would be great if the reference cooler on the Geforce 7800 GTX was silent as the noise output won't be a reason for me not to buy it until silent coolers are avaliable for it.

John Reid wrote:My EVGA 7800 GTX KO ACS³ is actually pretty damn quiet... the NForce4Pro heatsink fans are what make all of the noise for me...

And the KO is fast as hell, but runs cooler than the "lower end" EVGA 7800 (can you call such an expensive card "lower end?").

Temp maxes at 65c after playing an hour or so of Doom3, HL2 or Far Cry at 1920x1200 with all the settings maxed out.

Gotta quiet thos other fans

It's because of the metal structure enclosing the video card. I would kill for one, but because I know someone, i'm getting a much better deal on one.

What's interesting is that on ExtremeTech they show the 7800 GTXs that Dell uses for their XPS Gen 6 (600) series use the *Quadro*, yes, Quadro coolers (two heatsinks sandwiching in a big fan).

Shining Arcanine wrote:Ed, is your BFG card a Geforce 7800 GTX? While BFG is selling the GeForce 7800 GTX, assumptions based on their previous cards don't apply as Nvidia didn't give them enough time to deviate from the reference design.

Yes it is. I ended up getting rid of my two XFX cards and getting a BFG one (long story).

-Ed

Edward Ng wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:Ed, is your BFG card a Geforce 7800 GTX? While BFG is selling the GeForce 7800 GTX, assumptions based on their previous cards don't apply as Nvidia didn't give them enough time to deviate from the reference design.

Yes it is. I ended up getting rid of my two XFX cards and getting a BFG one (long story).

-Ed

Hi Ed,

Couldnt help but notice your XFX comment - could I ask you what happened? I'm runnning their 7800 GTX now and wonder if there is anything I should be looking out for.....

Joe

I'm curious too, and will be going either eVGA (lifetime warranty) or the ASUS TOP. But anything about these cards is good, the vast majority of which are based directly off reference design.

That TOP is not based off the reference design...

I was running SLI but had many issues; swapped to a completely different mainboard and the problems were not solved. Testing each card individually did not reveal which card was bad and I did not have a third card to swap around with to isolate the bad card, so I sent both cards back to NewEgg for repair/replacement RMA and they had no XFX cards in stock and so ended up refunding me in full. I saw a good deal on the BFG card at Dell.com at the time and pounced on it, but to get the discount on both cards I had to make two separate orders. In making my two orders I must've taken the last piece or straddled the stock status line and the second order ended up backordered while the first order shipped; when I got my first card I came to the conclusion that basically, one card is plenty fast for now and I should just save the rest of my money, so I cancelled the second card.

When the 7800 Ultra cards come out, I'll probably sell my remaining 7800GTX and get two of those and SLI them. Hopefully by then, the drivers will be more reliable as well for GF7800-series cards in SLI. I never ceased to have occasional boot issues in SLI mode with certain versions of the drivers, and the version that didn't have boot problems in SLI had a a graphic bug in Battlefield 2. It was like, a lose-lose situation. You spend $1,200 in video cards, how can unreliability be acceptable?!@!$

-Ed

The man has a point.

IonYz wrote:I'm curious too, and will be going either eVGA (lifetime warranty) or the ASUS TOP. But anything about these cards is good, the vast majority of which are based directly off reference design.

IonYz, all of the cards are based off the reference design, many of them follow it. If any of them deviate from it, chances are it is an attempt to cut corners.

Speaking of eVGA, I plan to get an eVGA Geforce 7800 GTX next year (for several reasons, in order of most important to least important: they're american, they strictly follow the nVidia reference design, they have excellent customer support from what I understand, they have a lifetime warranty, etc) so I'm sure you'll be happy with the eVGA.

Edward Ng wrote:I was running SLI but had many issues; swapped to a completely different mainboard and the problems were not solved. Testing each card individually did not reveal which card was bad and I did not have a third card to swap around with to isolate the bad card, so I sent both cards back to NewEgg for repair/replacement RMA and they had no XFX cards in stock and so ended up refunding me in full. I saw a good deal on the BFG card at Dell.com at the time and pounced on it, but to get the discount on both cards I had to make two separate orders. In making my two orders I must've taken the last piece or straddled the stock status line and the second order ended up backordered while the first order shipped; when I got my first card I came to the conclusion that basically, one card is plenty fast for now and I should just save the rest of my money, so I cancelled the second card.

When the 7800 Ultra cards come out, I'll probably sell my remaining 7800GTX and get two of those and SLI them. Hopefully by then, the drivers will be more reliable as well for GF7800-series cards in SLI. I never ceased to have occasional boot issues in SLI mode with certain versions of the drivers, and the version that didn't have boot problems in SLI had a a graphic bug in Battlefield 2. It was like, a lose-lose situation. You spend $1,200 in video cards, how can unreliability be acceptable?!@!$

-Ed

Ed, it might have been the bridge. Did you try pulling the connector and running SLI without it?

Shining Arcanine wrote:Ed, it might have been the bridge. Did you try pulling the connector and running SLI without it?

Two different mobos, two different bridges.

Actually, three different motherboards plus bridges. Two ABIT AN8-SLIs and one DFI LAN Party nF4 SLI-DR. The two ABITs fared equally poorly, with more boot issues than the DFI, and the DFI booted in with little or no issue but still had problems with freezing and crashing in 3D. All stability testing was done at default speeds and voltages, so no, it definitely was not an overclock-related problem.

-Ed

I got the x800 xt pe for about $240 a week back. Supposedly the 7800 will have twice the speed at twice the price, but I've come to the conclusion spending more than $250 on any component is a waste of cash. Since a lot of games are still going to be based of the Doom 3 or Havok engines, I shouldn't have an issue with running most games at high settings.

Also, I've taken to waiting to buy games until they hit the $20 dollar mark, either from markdown or from being on sale. I've come to realize I can still have some fairly good equipment and games without paying through the nose if I can have a little patience.