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GFX Upgrade (At Last)
darkcircuit
Member Posts: 211
Hey all,
After the recent excellent advice I was given by you guys in regards to upgrading my pc, I am now back to ask for some advice in upgrading my GFX card. I have roughly £200-250 to spend EX VAT from this website: www.scan.co.uk, I don't really have a preference for brand/manufacturer so please suggest what you think would perform best at inaudible (or near inaudible levels). I am NOT looking to run cards in SLI and therefore I am really looking at either the HD6970 or the GFX 570 and after reading independant reviews I am starting to sway towards the Nvidia as it seems to perform better in ATI biased games than the ATI performs in Nvidia biased games.
To give you guys further info, I was originally looking at the GTX570 Twin Frozr III Power edition, but its on pre-order and I have no idea when its going to be released, so I moved onto looking at the Asus Direct CUII due to its near audible level pre 60% fan speed. However I haven't settled my mind in any way so I'm ready and willing to be swayed by popular opinion 
My current PC spec is:
Case: Antec P180
Monitor: Samsung 24" running at 1920x1200
PSU: Seasonic X760W Gold 80+
MB: MSI P67A-GD53
Memory: 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz
HD: Seagate 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k (professionally OC'd to 4.5Ghz)
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Graphics: XFX HD 4870 1GB DDR5
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
Comments
well.. rather than that place.. i'd try novatech.. and this card in particular in that price range.. personal preferance.. and its inc Vat.. as exc Vat means you have to pay another 20 percent on top..
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/nvidiageforcegraphicscards/nvidiagtx570fermiseries/novatech/nov-570.html
also i've been shopping with novatech for years so i kind of trust them, and you can buy stuff from them using paypal... great for those of us who are paranoid about buying stuff online.. or just generally paranoid
Thanks for the link but I'm afraid I have to purchase from Scan for business reasons and yes I will be buying the card EX VAT.
your budget seems abit low for the 6970 with the quoted requirement. to meet your quoted requirement, you will need to add
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/thermalright-shaman-140mm-universal-vga-heatsink-for-ati-nvidia-includes-one-ty-140-pwn-fan
which will push you way above budget.
6970 is not a cold card. it has a TDP of 250w and unfortunately your cpu IS capable of pushing that card. So, that means it WILL sound like you have a pratt and whitney in your machine when you are gaming:D you will need something BIGGER(like the shaman) to cool it down if you want to reduce the noise level when gaming. as it stands, you are pushing the limits of the antec p180 cooling capacity w/o killing its acoustical advantage. to push MORE cooling air w/o raising decible would require something like a fortress FT02 or a raven RV02-E
so... the quesiton becomes, do you NEED the machine to be quiet, or do you NEED it to be FAST:p
blowing the heat back down across the Mobo seems like a step backwards tbh.. so not sure the shaman is really the right choice for any cpu.... even the arctic cooling ones blow the air across and away from the mobo, towards the rear fans most of the time. but.. if heating is really that much of an issue.. i'd go for one of the corsair liquid coolers..
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/cooling/watercooling/corsair/cwch80.html
i wouldnt use scan personally, mostly because of pricing.. but if its a business requirement.. im sure they have this cooler there too...i'd be surprised if they didnt. as any decent PC component retailer will have it.
agreed, i hate internal exhaust solutions especially for the hottest component in the box. however, there are no external exhaust solutions that are better then the reference cooler design. you have to keep in mind that GPU's are getting up in the 300w range when you start overclocking them. nvidia units already exceed that w/o overclocking... but we'll leave that discussion for another day:D
other "coolers" that directs the airflow towards the exhaust side of the case simply arent good enough. they are really only designed for 200w TDP GPU's there is only 3 options when you are looking at 300w TDP GPU's. one is the shaman with it's massive fan, another is the Prolimatech MK13, and last but not the least thermalright spitfire with VRM-R5.(tho due to the design of the thermalright spitfire, you may not be able to mount it in your case) all other coolers are designed for lower TDP GPU's.
the "closest" you'll get to the external exhaust design is a silentX IXG-80CA or as you mentioned the artic cooling Accelero S1 Rev2
there are a few other honorable mentions, but I think the point is across that IF you want quiet, the stock cooler isnt going to give it to you with that OC'ed i7 being the slavemaster of your 6970:D
now, if you REALLY want quiet, take a look at this:D
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/921189-GPU-passive-cooling-and-general-lowness-of-noise/page2
PS. the liquid unit you linked may require some creative mounting. 1st of all it's a CPU unit not a GPU unit. 2nd of all I dont think the p180 case has a 120mm side port near the GPU.
Guys I don't wanna sound ungrateful but your kinda hijacking the thread with all this talk of aftermarket coolers etc, I never mentioned in my OP that I was interested in aftermarket cooling, just that I want a quiet graphics card. I have decided on the GTX570 now as it offers certain advantages that the ATI doesn't, and Im currently tossing a coin between the Asus GTX 570 DirectCU II and the MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozr III.
I can't find the Twin Frozr III version available in this country yet and there are very few reviews about this card in particular so its very hard for me to make a solid decision, whereas there are a lot more reviews for the Asus. From what I can tell the advantages & cons of both are as below (tell me if Im wrong about any of this):
Asus
Pros: Quiet enough to be inaudible even under load, remains nice and cool even under load.
Cons: Bulky & long (roughly 2" longer than the MSI), not a reliable OC'er (some people state better results than others).
MSI
Pros: Very overclockable, remains cooler than the Asus under load.
Cons: Noiser than the Asus and very little if no professional standard reviews of the card.
Baring in mind that a quiet GFX card is important to me and I don't plan to run SLI, would you guys recommend the Asus over the MSI?
I think that's the deciding factor:)
The nVIdia reference design is actually fairly quiet, they put a lot of work into fan optimization after getting ridiculed over it being so awful in the 400-series.
The 6970 and 570 are pretty well blow for blow. 6970 has Powertune, which is an amazing technology (basically, your video card is overclocked all the time, and downclocks if it sees it's drawing too much power: without Powertune, you have to underclock the video card so that if you run something demanding it won't crash and burn - this is why so many older cards and almost all nVidia cards seem to overclock so well). But if it's game support you are worried about, that's per-game: prior to this year nVidia mostly had the slight advantage, but now ATI seems to be pulling ahead, and most everything this year seems to lean toward ATI. But all in all, you'll see pretty similar performance between the 6970 and 570.
The 570 reference card probably has a quieter cooler than the 6970 reference design. I wouldn't worry about getting an aftermarket cooler too much, it will be quieter, but not by a huge amount. Especially considering the price that gets charged for those aftermarket coolers (The Asus DirectCU is a good performer, but notoriously more expensive than a reference card). I have a reference 6970, the fan was noticeable once you pushed the card (I have some OpenCL programs that run on it that push it to 100%, it would spin the fan, but under normal gaming it wasn't very audible). I ultimately replaced the stock fan and heatsink with a waterblock (not because of the noise, just because I had the capacity in my water loop). I don't have any experience with a 570, but I've read a lot of reviews about them, which is all I can really say about that.
Technology-wise, ATI has the advantage because of PowerTune. Performance-wise, they are about equal all things considered. Both cards are moderately heavy power-wise and heat-wise (at stock clocks 6970 is 243W, the 570 is 219W), but both are upper-tiered performance parts.
Also something to consider:
A stock reference 6950 can be flashed and unlocked to perform as well as a 6970, for considerably less money, and when you don't need the performance you can just flip a BIOS switch and go back to stock 6950 clocks and shaders for a considerable power and noise savings. Overclock to be identical to a 6970 when you need the boost, back to stock when your just browsing the web (granted, it does take the computer being shut down to flip that BIOS switch, although there are some software overclock solutions that don't need that - one is even built into the ATI Catalyst software).
The shader-heavy architecture of Northern Islands tends to scale better to higher settings than the geometry-heavy architecture of Fermi. Thus, even if a Radeon HD 6970 and a GeForce GTX 570 tend to perform about the same on average, the 6970 will more often win in cases where performance is low enough in both cards for the difference to matter.
A Radeon HD 6970 tends to use less power than a GeForce GTX 570. While the TDPs would indicate the opposite, AMD and Nvidia use TDP to mean different things in this range. A Radeon HD 6970 has a TDP of 250 W to mean, we've got hardware in place to ensure that the card can never draw more than 250 W, and in typical gaming loads, it won't come anywhere near that. A GeForce GTX 570 has a TDP of 225 W to mean, relatively heavy gaming loads may make the card pull around 225 W, and stress tests that Nvidia isn't aware of to throttle down in drivers could make the card pull a lot more.
If you want external exhaust, then you're looking at reference cards. The reference GeForce GTX 570 has a better cooler than the reference Radeon HD 6970. That will keep the reference GTX 570 a little cooler and quite a bit quieter. On the other hand, the 6970 has better power circuitry, so it can pull 250 W and it's no big deal. Overclocking a reference GTX 570 is dangerous to the card, though it should be fine at stock speeds. If quiet is a big deal to you, then you probably shouldn't be overclocking.
If you want relatively cheap reference cards, then here they are:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1280mb-msi-gtx-570-40nm-3800mhz-gddr5-gpu-732mhz-shader-1464mhz-480-cores-dl-dvi-mhdmi
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-msi-radeon-hd6970-pci-e-21-(x16)-5500mhz-gddr5-gpu-880mhz-1536-cores-dvi-mhdmi-mdp
The PNY version of the GTX 570 is likely also a reference card, but all that the site shows is a box, so I'm not certain of that.
If you want a premium internal exhaust cooler, then for a GTX 570, the MSI Twin Frozr III is an easy choice:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1280mb-msi-gtx-570-twin-frozr-iii-power-edition-oc-40nm-4000mhz-gddr5-gpu-770mhz-shader-1540mhz
It's the cheapest aftermarket cooler that the site has, and it might also be the best. MSI also uses their Twin Frozr coolers in their "Lightning Edition" cards, so you can check reviews of those to see how it performs. The Lightning Edition cards do go overboard with power circuitry, and also carefully bin the GPUs to allow higher overclocks (e.g., Nvidia sent us a bunch of GTX 570 GPUs, so we're going to test and pick the 10% of them that can overclock the furthest, and put those in the lightning edition cards). The twin frozr cards have an excellent cooler, but are otherwise typical GTX 570s, so they don't come with the big price premium of MSI's lightning edition cards.
The site doesn't offer an MSI Twin Frozr card for the 6970. It actually doesn't offer many 6970s at all. Rumors say that the top end Radeon HD 7000 series card could launch as soon as September, and if that's the case, then AMD probably doesn't want a bunch of 6970s still sitting around unsold when the next generation hits. The ScanFX house brand card probably isn't a premium card. That leaves the Asus DirectCU II and the Gigabyte WindForce as the attempts at making a premium 6970.
Asus' original DirectCU cooler was unimpressive. The DirectCU II is somewhat better, but a triple slot cooler, and still makes some noise. Gigabyte's WindForce (which looks exactly like what they use in some of their Super OverClock cards) would likely be better:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-gigabyte-hd-6970-oc-pci-e-21-(x16)-5500mhz-gddr5-gpu-900mhz-1536cores-2x-dvi-dp-hdmi
There's also the question of features. If you want CUDA or PhysX, you have to get an Nvidia card. If you want MLAA, PowerTune, or three (or more!) monitors on a single card, you have to get an AMD card.
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In other news, nice computer, except that there isn't an SSD. So it will be slow. That's a great power supply, too. I hate seeing people come in and, when asked what power supply they have, they'll say 800 W or whatever, but don't know what power supply it is, and then later you find out that it's a piece of junk that sells for $40 and is probably unsafe at any wattage.