Can you recommend me a 950

[xen]

Currently the noisiest component of my system is a Seasonic S12II-330 PSU. I am meaning to replace that one as well.

But at this time I am looking to purchase a GTX 950 graphics card. I must say I don't like the idle passive modes of PSUs and GPUs. I prefer a low constant fanspeed but that doesn't seem to be the thing these days.

By low constant I mean low constant for idle.

Earlier I just wanted to get some Corsair PSU on rebate together probably with a Palit KalmX 750ti. However that failed as the shop cancelled my order while I was still adjusting it even though they had said they would put it on hold. Later I tried the reverse, I ordered an Antec Edge (which is not all too silent) together with an Asus 750 (no Ti) but the shop once again failed me and delivered an Antec VPF that I had wanted to be removed from the order.

So getting a bit fed up with them and with these 750s, and seeing that now a reasonable amount of time has already passed again, I just put my eye on a 950.

There's just so much fun in ordering something and not more than that. This shop keeps frustrating my attempts, in the light of my choices often depending on price these days and in the Netherlands there are really never any special offers on items such as these. There are typically no special offers on any computer gear. They offered a "demo" (RMA'd) Corsair-CS-550M for a little less but it took me a bit of work to get free shipping on that as well. So often (with this retailer) I place an order as I'm still looking at what (combination) of products I wish to buy. But if the shop then cancels the order (because payment doesn't come in fast enough) or removes the wrong products from the order (after I have emailed them with my final setup) it kinda gets pointless to work with them still, even if they have the best ordering system of all the shops in the Netherlands.

And then they're like "can't you be happy with what we sent you?" and that just blew my mind. Typical customer service in the Netherlands is completely rotten and they are really still the best out there.

Right now I'm checking out second hand sites but there's not much on offer.

I had my eye on the MSI GTX 950 2GD5 OC yesterday, it is that white card:



But MSI, I don't know why, kinda f-cked up on the fan speed, as many companies do. Perhaps you remember the Antec EDGE that is just a lot noiser than Antec claims it to be. And I'm always wondering whether I can undervolt them with just a simple cable.

So the MSI looks good, has a single fan and 2xDVI (which I like) but its lowest fan speed is 1500RPM. Which is nonsensical. My CPU is a 95W one and with my passive cooling (only case fans) I can't get it to run hotter than 55 degrees. And those fans all run at the lowest possible speed.

Question #1:

* Is it doable with a simple purchase to undervolt the fans on these cards with e.g. a simple resistor cable?

Amazon sells this thing: http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Noise-Reduc ... B00N41A2Z0



If these cards and PSUs feature a same PWM socket, it should be possible to use one, right?

Still wanting that card.

- it is white
- it has 2x DVI

- I do not want any red card
- I wouldn't mind a longer heatsink but dual fan seems pointless to me. You could devise a great heatsink that is bigger, with just one fan, and it would perform better than these cards with two fans on them. Unfortunately, this doesn't exist. So I would prefer a card with one fan and big heatsink.

- One card I could enjoy is this one (based on looks):

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Windforce OC 2 GB


Unfortunately it is again a bad card at keeping noise down. I keep being interested in noisy components.

Then I could also still get a second-hand 750 Ti which is also a Windforce card, but is said(?) to be quieter:



"The fans are pretty silent as well. It’s barely noticeable on idle to medium load, and at full load the fans are still running whisper quiet." -- ThePCEnthusiast.

So the choices for me seem to be some noisy options that I may be able to undervolt, or some second hand that is said to be quieter for €100.

[edh]

Amazon sells this thing: [snip]

If these cards and PSUs feature a same PWM socket, it should be possible to use one, right?

Trouble is graphics cards use a different header to normal 4 pin fans. You can find connectors for it and solder up something yourself or perhaps put in a resistor yourself into the existing cable.

For a GTX 950 a better solution might be an Accelero S1 Plus or S3 anyway. Then the card should be able to run passive.

[xen]

I thought so. The header is smaller, thinner. So I'd either need to take the male header from the existing fan, and put it on the cable, put the male header from the cable on the existing fan,

or get two of those fan headers if i can and put them on the cable.

but I don't have a soldering kit here. Resistor would be an option, never done it before, needs some calculation, but I would need a soldering station again.... :-/.

I wanted to get one earlier but I have no room for it here really.

Arctic thing seems ugly and it is (only) 35 euro but still.

If I got that. I don't know. I'm just crying now about something else.

Life.

I think I'll just try to do the soldering thing. Needed to get into that some time anyway.

Long time past the date for that though. Losing everything.

Soldering station costs 25 euro and a roll of tin costs 9 euro. I guess I might. Has been in a shopping cart for 13 months now .

I risk it being taken away from me though, or just losing it. I'm in a kind of prison.

So I either do this or get the second hand or just bail and give up.

Maybe I just order the one I want and then see what happens. I guess I'll do that...

I ordered some of these as well:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/4-Pin-Re ... 09282.html

I doubt they are the correct sockets, they look just like PWM. The pins are too long probably so they are probably regular PWM plugs. And the seller reportedly sends 3-pin cables instead of 4-pin. Well. I found one though:

http://www.quicktoshoppingmall.com/inde ... ucts_id=67. They don't ship to the Netherlands. Found another one http://www.lightake.com/p/Four-Pin-Cabl ... tml?ref=cj. Shipping from Hong Kong / China is so cheap.

[Smanci]

"The fans are pretty silent as well. It’s barely noticeable on idle to medium load, and at full load the fans are still running whisper quiet." -- ThePCEnthusiast.

So the choices for me seem to be some noisy options that I may be able to undervolt, or some second hand that is said to be quieter for €100.

It's a pleasantly as-far-as-it-can-get-from-quiet card with minimum fan speed of 56%, or 1650RPM. Rule of thumb: do not trust any comments on noise outside SPCR and maybe Techpowerup.
Too many of these 750s are noisier than 150W+ TDp cards.

Quote from user ojg:
"I got the Gigabyte GTX 750 TI (GV-N75TOC-2GI) because it had the connectors I wanted and heatsink with heatpipe.
I installed latest nvidia drivers (334.89) and the OC Guru II.

Here are my observations:
- The card will not boot without the PCIe power cable plugged in.
- Idle power at windows desktop is reported at <2% of TDP!
- The minimum fan speed setting is 56% which equals 1650RPM. This is far too loud for silentpcreview enthusiast. Not a high pitch or rattle, just a lot of whoosh.
- The 100% speed is 3000RPM...
- Temperatures are 28deg idle and settles at 53deg after running FurMark for a while both at minimum fan setting.
- When running passive, that is disconnecting the fan cable but without removing the fans, the idle temperature is 41deg.
- Temperature throttling works well, setting max temp to 80deg results in a stable frequency of 300MHz(!) after a few minutes with FurMark when running passively."

[xen]

Thank you. So that is really the truth about "WindForce".

Yes, my apologies. I had noticed... I have noticed many times that what other people call quiet or even silent usually means that in a silent room, the noise dominates everything.

My PSU, the Seasonic SII12, is called "very quiet". Well, if you are at floor-level (level with the computer) the noise is very dominant. I only have 3 fans running + PSU at the moment. So thank you.

I have two case fans from a Scythe Mugen 2-fan edition mounted not on the Mugen but in the case as intake and exhaust fans, both undervolted with a cable. Then I have the Antec 200mm fan at the top running at lowest setting or undervolted to 7V at medium settings, don't remember now. And the Seasonic is easily twice as loud as the rest.

So we can simply disregard Gigabyte entirely, I believe. The MSI I want to buy is horrid of course. In a few weeks I should at least have some fitting noise reduction cables. I ordered two. I can chain them if I want. They may reduce a 1500 rpm fan to about 800 rpm perhaps even. I bet I won't even run into troubles with higher load. Why the hell should a commercial addon allow it to run fanless, but some 92mm shouldn't be able to cool it enough. That's just nonsensical. If you run your games 24/7 you should invest in better cooling, and otherwise the percentage of time a card is going to be on full load is only going to be 10-20% of its lifetime. This chip running at 50-60 degrees C. is not going to be so damaging, I don't believe that. Higher temperatures help passive cooling a great deal, because passive heat dissipation is greatly increased with higher temperature differences. That also means that the airflow of cards that try to maintain a 40 degree level is just wasted for a large part, requiring fans to run faster to keep the cooling up. If you let the heat go up a little more, cooling becomes vastly more effective.

Therefore, undervolting a fan will make the overall heat level rise compared to stock cooling, but it won't really be that damaging I think to the chips and cooling efficiency and effectiveness as a measure of airflow and noise, actually goes up. And if it's trouble I can always undervolt/underclock the GPU. I was meaning to undervolt the EDGE PSU as well though. I bet the FAN will still start even with 2V less. It could make a horridly noisy fan (or fan profile) into something quite pleasant, I'm sure. Let's just say then that I hold a different opinion about electronic lifetimes. I don't know, but I have NEVER had a component fail on me. I mean by itself.

In the computers I was maintaining back at university the fans of PSUs would fail. Not the PSUs themselves. The fans would grind to halt. The PSUs kept going.

My first PSU ran for at least - I mean the first one I bought - at least it ran from 2001 till say 2008 (?) and it still works. Maybe I replaced it sooner. The Tagan that may still be in my signature was not very efficient which is why I replaced it, but I expect it to work another 10 years. I have more doubts about the Nexus(?) PSU that is in that computer today. The Tagan was really quite silent, it had two very slow spinning 80mm fans. I've never seen a CPU fail or seen memory fail. I've seen faulty GPUs but they were not mine. So not sure where I got them. I've never had a motherboard fail by itself.

So I don't know why people keep talking so much about component lifetime. Dirty people can ruin a motherboard by touching it (we call them cops) and hasty people can ruin a motherboard while doing stuff to it while it is running (we call them me) or by connecting cables wrong (when there is no indication of how to do it right) (that's also me) or even they can ruin a CPU by inserting it wrong into the socket (that is way back ).

That's why I think undervolting PSU and GPU fans is still a reasonable path to take?

[baii]

Gpu fan is easy to control, msi afterburner, your own fan curve, unless the min rpm is too high for you. Hmm, seems like the case. They do sell gpu fan header to normal pwm header, but not the other way around.



Psu can be easy/tough, there are passive and semi passive one, but they may whine. Or you can find one that known not to whine and change the fan. Or just grab a few semi passive one can keep the good one.

What do you mainly use the gpu for? Can you say dump it all together and go skylake?

[xen]

Currently the GPU is / was to be used for Diablo3 but I also want to play Overwatch.

And I bought Borderlands 2 once upon a time, but haven't been able to play yet. Then I want to get back into WoW battleground gaming some time.

So that's like 3 blizzard games.

Recommended minimum specs for Overwatch is currently a 750ti. I thought, if I'm going to do overwatch anyway, best get something slightly better, because last time I had the recommended min specs for Diablo 3 and it didn't run as smooth as I had hoped. Now also, my resolution is higher.

So basically the 950 is for running Overwatch at 1080p. And D3, and WoW. And Borderlands perhaps. Other than that I only play older games.

[lodestar]

You could consider the EVGA GTX 950 FTW 2GB. This has fans which don't even run when the GPU is under 60C. Even when they do speeds can be less than 1000 rpm. To achieve all this the FTW does have quite a large cooler so you need room to fit this card. EVGA say "...the new EVGA ACX 2.0 Cooling has superior cooling performance and power savings with swept fan blades, double ball bearings and an extreme low power motor, delivering more airflow with less power...".

Image courtesy of the Fudzilla review of this card showing maximum GPU temperature under load as 70C; maximum fan speed as 785 rpm. Once load is removed fans turn off.

[xen]

Hi Thanks. Perhaps I should have said that I consider the EVGAs to be butt-ugly .

I'm kinda jealous of that card. I never was jealous in the past of anything mostly. Now I'm jealous of much about everything.

Such low noise / fan speed is of course exactly what you want.

It would even fit in my case. But I also need a card that I can fit elsewhere. And for some reason I am trying to stay away from dual fan.

Thanks man.

[xen]

I just ordered the short noisy MSI I wanted. Still jealous of that EVGA.

So I don't know why the hell I am ordering something that only looks good.

Apart from the fact that I prefer 2x DVI connections and not a row of DisplayPorts.

I guess the jealousy stems from not having the money for something more expensive. Or from killing myself with cold liquid, feels like terminator type. Cold liquid metal, if such a thing would exist .

Thinking Matrix as well. Since I am probably going to be the only SPCR member with that 1500 RPM MSI, I will let you know about my experiences :p.

No clue what is going to happen to this PC as well. I might lose it, anything might happen.

[xen]

According to a post in this thread about the 750Ti, there is going to be a high chance that my 1500 rpm minimum fan might have some rather high mininum rpm setting, that is to say, a rather high starting voltage.

If this is true my sweet little cables aren't going to do much. Except turn the fan off, which is not exactly the worst of worlds, but still.

Many of these cards have closed off heatsinks, by the (in this case) white outer casing of the card. So if I did that I would have to remove the white - one of the reasons I even bought it . I have all-white computer gear now, almost.

My keyboard, TV(monitor), case and access point are all white, except for the mouse. And my GPU will also be "white".

Fans are black though :p.

I have an Antec P180 Mini White now, and it has a 760G mobo from Asus with an AMD FX 6300 CPU. It is not my main PC which I could say is "at home" but it is the fastest I have. One year ago life didn't go as planned but I was planning to move my home system (780G mobo, Athlon X2 5050e) into another Antec P180 Mini White, that I sent back.

I sent it back because the seller (second hand) was actually selling a case that belonged to someone else, and hence it didn't feel right or any good for me.

That system is now contained in some no-name (I guess it was a Cooler Master) case with rather noisy fans, but I had to get something.

The system is something I don't feel happy about anymore as some police people touched the motherboard when removing a cable, and the system subsequently started giving weird errors (in Ubuntu) that eventually faded as I began caressing the thing and all chips on it with my own de-staticised hands. I basically drew static electricity (I call it emotion) out of the chips and the errors disappeared. But I don't trust the thing anymore as it doesn't give or hasn't given any instability, but I just can't trust it yet, or anymore.

I posted a thread with pictures about that Antec P180 Mini white, but never completed. Right now I can't really make any sensible pictures worth looking at.

Poor.

Perhaps it's time to change my signature though.

In any case, next Thursday I will have a a) Corsair RM 550 and b) MSI GTX 950 non-gaming.

Fan speed reduction cables might take longer to arrive, shipping from Hong Kong probably.

Not sure I have any fan headers left, I don't think so.

Probably just one PWM and one 3-pin.

My other options seems to be like to replace the heatsink with something I could or would salvage from a broken card. There is bound to be older cards that sell cheap but that still have a long heatsink (I mean twin frozr or windforce, or similar) which means, given the amount of case fans I have, that I might even be able to run it passively, since the heatsinks would extend way past the card length. And right into a intake case fan .

Which is an option, together with undervolting or throttling the card. So it might turn out to be a good card in the end, I don't know yet.

Regards, X.

[xen]

The 4-pin resistor cable at lightake.com is apparently no longer being produced.

So I haven't found anything else yet that can do it, nor may it be very necessary, since you can apparently mod the BIOS of at least the 970 and 980, so assumedly also for the 960 and 950 bioses.

Regards.

[Koolpc]

Asus GTX 950 STRIX OC Gaming 2GB GDDR5

Silent. Simple. Cannot hear it at all!

[xen]

. I sent back my 950, but still can't decide on a 960 because I prefer one with 2x DVI and my wishes etc....

. Trying to get a MSI or Gainward at this point. I know they are both more noisy, but I like to get something special as well.