There is also an undeclocked passively cooled ASUS ENGTS450 model. It would be very interesting to see how they perform against each other and can they play any games. Perhaps it would be useless to test new games like Crysis 2 but Quake Wars which I know have been used for benchmarking in the past would be very interesting too see how it performs.
GPUs have been getting bigger and more resource-intensive for a while now - backwards from what CPUs have been doing lately. Having to buy new cases to fit monster 250W video cards is not a trend I like very much.
"Given that even the NVIDIA GT 5xx models seem to be looking a bit dated right now, we asked Zotac as to why this cooling mechanism wasn't put on one of the more recent NVIDIA GPUs. It appears that the thermal limitations of passive cooling required underclocking which NVIDIA wouldn't allow on the 500 series. "
Plus if you underclock a GTX550, you pretty much exactly get a GTS450 anyway... That said, the memory bandwidth will really hurt. Going for ddr3 instead of gddr5 makes sense probably for power reasons, but there is no excuse for sacrificing even more performance by only using pathetic ddr3-1333 instead of ddr3-1600, there is almost nothing to gain for power, and it doesn't save much money neither.
Might be in the market for passively cooled upgrade to use with PhotoShop CS5. However, I'm feeling pretty satisfied with the HD-3000 graphics on the 2600K .... 6.4 / 6.4 on Win-7-64 Experience Index so I may stay with the embedded HD-3000.
I am ignorant on whether the HD-3000 has CUDA capabilities that I think PhotoShop can use for filters and rendering.
Interesting, this, as the GTS450 I've got is by far the noisiest component I've got in my desktop. However, mine is factory-OC'd to 850, and I'll occasionally bump that up to 900 or so. The most modern thing I can put specs to is GTA IV, where it was getting around 60 fps with everything high @1680x1050. I wonder what downclocking it that far will do.
FWIW, though, a friend recently build an SB system with an NVIDIA card lower on the scale than mine (can't recall which offhand) and has been quite happy with the performance in CS5. He only paid maybe $70 or so for it, as I recall.
I'd say this could be a win for the green team - AT is right that there has been a severe lack of options on the passive front for NVIDIA.
Incidentally, can't any tech sites use (or modify) a dictionary for the comments/forums that has more tech words/brands? AMD, NVIDIA, CUDA, overclock, downclock, etc., all show up as mis-spelled (not Intel, though, interestingly...) First tech site to get this right wins the internet! (really? 'internet', too? I don't care what you say, it's not a proper noun to me.)
You do know that's it's your web browser that's doing the spell check on the input box, right?
I mean, yes, a site can interfere with that, and drop it's own, but it would mean figuring out how to do that on each, and every, browser that currently supports spell-check, out there.
You do realize that Internet is always a proper noun. All Collegiate dictionaries recognize this fact. Also when it comes to Proper names not recognized by the browser's dictionary, you can add that word to the built in dictionary, so that it will get it right the next time. Of course, that does no good when incorrect words are accidentally added into the custom dictionary.
I have never built one but how loud would a i7-2600k and a GTX560 Ti be if they were on a custom water setup with a dual 120 radiator? I know that it wouldn't be silent, but it would be a good compromise of power and acoustics, right?
A water cooled system is as quiet as your 120mm fans on the radiator. I've been using a 2x120 with mid range yate loons for my CPU for a few years to get a large OC with virtually no noise. My IB/NV6xx build will probably expand that to a 3x120 rad so I can add my GPU to the loop.
This might make a great cheap, silent workstation card for that kind of use. The slow memory that will hurt in games shouldn't have any effect on CUDA apps.
I agree. ATI's fglrx drivers are horrid, video tearing to the max. This is why I stick with Nvidia products only. The older version hardware (GTS 450) also allows time for a more mature drivers to be developed, at least in the OSS side of things. I may pick this card up and finally retire my 9800GT Silent Cell.
More mature my ass, with Windows 7, more broken is closer to the truth. In the Windows arena, nVidia drivers are shocking. So much so that videos played in 32 bit Windows 7 Media Center with a GT520 and the current drivers (Ver 285.62) display a black screen. To get Media Center to work I had to use an older driver (Ver 270.61), which also has (different) problems. All the nVidia drivers have speckling issues with recent cards and DirectX 11. I will agree than with Linux, nVidia rules, but I'm afraid that with Windows nVidia simply doesn't work! I only went back to nVidia to resolve sleep issues, but am reverting back to an ATI 6450 silent card, which has ample grunt for WMC and most importantly, drivers that work.
Interesting. My recent experience has been pretty much the opposite of the OP's and yours.
Since I don't play games, I built a new computer in September with the assumption that the combination of a Sandy Bridge IGP and a z68 motherboard would be sufficient for me. The OS is Windows Server 2008 R2, courtesy of the Microsoft DreamSpark program.
The hardware of the Sandy Bridge IGP was probably OK, but I had nothing but constant problems with the Intel driver. This is one of the few situations where hardware or software that's qualified for use on Win7 64 bit doesn't work on R2.
The Intel driver always installs on R2 with errors. Video on Netflix tears in every frame with moderate to fast motion. 3d acceleration isn't available in a Win7 64 bit guest running in VirtualBox on the R2 host.
I gave up and bought a GT 440 during the Thanksgiving promotions. I'm using the latest stable nVidia drivers and I uninstalled the IGP in device manager. All problems were solved immediately.
I think it's nice to have some companies catering to the "silence" market. I am always interested in such GPU. I used to own 2 x 4850 passively cooled (from Gigabytes) and was extremely statisifed with the performances and noise. I am only surprised that this market is not well served because I am sure there is more buyers interested in this segment than what the offer would suggest. It's true that usually such GPU commands a premium price over the standard version but I for one don't mine paying it.
You pay a significant premium over fanned 6850s, but in return you get complete silence. Worth it for someone like me who is sensitive to noise.
I hope we'll be able to fit high end cards with passive coolers someday. The days of jet-engine graphics cards well eventually be over and silent computers be become the standard even with top of the line hardware.
Actually , Any with specific TDP can be passively cooled..
all what you need to do is to buy a passive heatsink for the card. actually all companies use off the shelve passive coolers , if ou look hard you will recognize them.
I dont let VGA makers decide for the Passive cooled card for me , I just buy a reference not Oced and buy a cooling solution...
the 6850 has 127Watt TDP
guess what ...
nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti has ONLY 116 TDP
if you can passively cool 6850 YOU CAN cool GTX 550TI MORE
and btw that 6850 passive cooler takes 3 slots its huge ... you can passively cool GTX550i using the same cooler.
and you can also cool GTX560 TI using very slow silent 120m fan with a huge 3 slots cooler as well
There's no such thing as a passively cooled 100 watt chip in the same chassis with another 100 watts of CPU, etc., power dissipation. While massive heat-piped heat sinks can work wonders, they will still have their limits. I do thermal testing on various networking add-in boards, and it's a BIG DEAL when we change from a 10 watt ASIC to a 15 watt ASIC. We spec a certain minimum air-flow in LFM and/or a maximum ambient temperature. You better believe that these GPU monsters are going to need to breathe some fresh air. If you put a high powered "passively cooled" graphics card into a TOTALY passively cooled chassis, it's going to FRY unless you live in an igloo.
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lordmetroid - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
There is also an undeclocked passively cooled ASUS ENGTS450 model. It would be very interesting to see how they perform against each other and can they play any games. Perhaps it would be useless to test new games like Crysis 2 but Quake Wars which I know have been used for benchmarking in the past would be very interesting too see how it performs.ganeshts - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Interesting! I couldn't see it on Newegg.. Do you have a link for the ASUS unit?jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
newegg does not carry it, but other online stores do:http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=ENGTS450+...
There is also a fanless Sparkle GTS 450:
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q...
But I like the looks of the new Zotac one. The fins are oriented in the proper direction for easy airflow from front-to-back of the case.
tzhu07 - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
I've always thought that the GPU was the last remaining noisy component that has yet to be silenced at the high end.We have CPU coolers that can run passively and cool a 2600K, powerful hybrid 600W+ PSUs that only spin up under high enough loads, silent SSDs...
GPU noise still seems to be a problem. We still cannot get the high end cards to be inaudible under load.
KorruptioN - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
GPUs have been getting bigger and more resource-intensive for a while now - backwards from what CPUs have been doing lately. Having to buy new cases to fit monster 250W video cards is not a trend I like very much.Marlin1975 - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Why? The GTS450 is a dead chip. Teh GTX550 replaced it.mlcloud - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
Did you even read the article...?"Given that even the NVIDIA GT 5xx models seem to be looking a bit dated right now, we asked Zotac as to why this cooling mechanism wasn't put on one of the more recent NVIDIA GPUs. It appears that the thermal limitations of passive cooling required underclocking which NVIDIA wouldn't allow on the 500 series. "
mczak - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Plus if you underclock a GTX550, you pretty much exactly get a GTS450 anyway...That said, the memory bandwidth will really hurt. Going for ddr3 instead of gddr5 makes sense probably for power reasons, but there is no excuse for sacrificing even more performance by only using pathetic ddr3-1333 instead of ddr3-1600, there is almost nothing to gain for power, and it doesn't save much money neither.
l_d_allan - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Might be in the market for passively cooled upgrade to use with PhotoShop CS5. However, I'm feeling pretty satisfied with the HD-3000 graphics on the 2600K .... 6.4 / 6.4 on Win-7-64 Experience Index so I may stay with the embedded HD-3000.I am ignorant on whether the HD-3000 has CUDA capabilities that I think PhotoShop can use for filters and rendering.
fluxtatic - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
No, indeed - CUDA is NVIDIA's.Interesting, this, as the GTS450 I've got is by far the noisiest component I've got in my desktop. However, mine is factory-OC'd to 850, and I'll occasionally bump that up to 900 or so. The most modern thing I can put specs to is GTA IV, where it was getting around 60 fps with everything high @1680x1050. I wonder what downclocking it that far will do.
FWIW, though, a friend recently build an SB system with an NVIDIA card lower on the scale than mine (can't recall which offhand) and has been quite happy with the performance in CS5. He only paid maybe $70 or so for it, as I recall.
I'd say this could be a win for the green team - AT is right that there has been a severe lack of options on the passive front for NVIDIA.
Incidentally, can't any tech sites use (or modify) a dictionary for the comments/forums that has more tech words/brands? AMD, NVIDIA, CUDA, overclock, downclock, etc., all show up as mis-spelled (not Intel, though, interestingly...) First tech site to get this right wins the internet! (really? 'internet', too? I don't care what you say, it's not a proper noun to me.)
Paul Tarnowski - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
You do know that's it's your web browser that's doing the spell check on the input box, right?I mean, yes, a site can interfere with that, and drop it's own, but it would mean figuring out how to do that on each, and every, browser that currently supports spell-check, out there.
Black1969ta - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
You do realize that Internet is always a proper noun. All Collegiate dictionaries recognize this fact. Also when it comes to Proper names not recognized by the browser's dictionary, you can add that word to the built in dictionary, so that it will get it right the next time. Of course, that does no good when incorrect words are accidentally added into the custom dictionary.I have never built one but how loud would a i7-2600k and a GTX560 Ti be if they were on a custom water setup with a dual 120 radiator? I know that it wouldn't be silent, but it would be a good compromise of power and acoustics, right?
DanNeely - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
A water cooled system is as quiet as your 120mm fans on the radiator. I've been using a 2x120 with mid range yate loons for my CPU for a few years to get a large OC with virtually no noise. My IB/NV6xx build will probably expand that to a 3x120 rad so I can add my GPU to the loop.futurepastnow - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
This might make a great cheap, silent workstation card for that kind of use. The slow memory that will hurt in games shouldn't have any effect on CUDA apps.Meaker10 - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Surely a passively cooled 6770 (which come at full clocks and GDDR5) would be a better choice?jwilliams4200 - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Not for those who want CUDA.lordmetroid - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
If you are using Linux, you generally want to stay as far away as possible from ATI cards cause the proprietary drivers are hell to get working.wolfdale - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
I agree. ATI's fglrx drivers are horrid, video tearing to the max. This is why I stick with Nvidia products only. The older version hardware (GTS 450) also allows time for a more mature drivers to be developed, at least in the OSS side of things. I may pick this card up and finally retire my 9800GT Silent Cell.mcquade181 - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link
More mature my ass, with Windows 7, more broken is closer to the truth.In the Windows arena, nVidia drivers are shocking. So much so that videos played in 32 bit Windows 7 Media Center with a GT520 and the current drivers (Ver 285.62) display a black screen. To get Media Center to work I had to use an older driver (Ver 270.61), which also has (different) problems. All the nVidia drivers have speckling issues with recent cards and DirectX 11.
I will agree than with Linux, nVidia rules, but I'm afraid that with Windows nVidia simply doesn't work!
I only went back to nVidia to resolve sleep issues, but am reverting back to an ATI 6450 silent card, which has ample grunt for WMC and most importantly, drivers that work.
P_Turner - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
Interesting. My recent experience has been pretty much the opposite of the OP's and yours.Since I don't play games, I built a new computer in September with the assumption that the combination of a Sandy Bridge IGP and a z68 motherboard would be sufficient for me. The OS is Windows Server 2008 R2, courtesy of the Microsoft DreamSpark program.
The hardware of the Sandy Bridge IGP was probably OK, but I had nothing but constant problems with the Intel driver. This is one of the few situations where hardware or software that's qualified for use on Win7 64 bit doesn't work on R2.
The Intel driver always installs on R2 with errors. Video on Netflix tears in every frame with moderate to fast motion. 3d acceleration isn't available in a Win7 64 bit guest running in VirtualBox on the R2 host.
I gave up and bought a GT 440 during the Thanksgiving promotions. I'm using the latest stable nVidia drivers and I uninstalled the IGP in device manager. All problems were solved immediately.
Wurmer - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
I think it's nice to have some companies catering to the "silence" market. I am always interested in such GPU. I used to own 2 x 4850 passively cooled (from Gigabytes) and was extremely statisifed with the performances and noise. I am only surprised that this market is not well served because I am sure there is more buyers interested in this segment than what the offer would suggest. It's true that usually such GPU commands a premium price over the standard version but I for one don't mine paying it.tzhu07 - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link
I agree. Currently the best passively cooled graphics card is a HD6850:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
You pay a significant premium over fanned 6850s, but in return you get complete silence. Worth it for someone like me who is sensitive to noise.
I hope we'll be able to fit high end cards with passive coolers someday. The days of jet-engine graphics cards well eventually be over and silent computers be become the standard even with top of the line hardware.
sna1970 - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link
Actually , Any with specific TDP can be passively cooled..all what you need to do is to buy a passive heatsink for the card. actually all companies use off the shelve passive coolers , if ou look hard you will recognize them.
I dont let VGA makers decide for the Passive cooled card for me , I just buy a reference not Oced and buy a cooling solution...
the 6850 has 127Watt TDP
guess what ...
nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti has ONLY 116 TDP
if you can passively cool 6850 YOU CAN cool GTX 550TI MORE
and btw that 6850 passive cooler takes 3 slots its huge ... you can passively cool GTX550i using the same cooler.
and you can also cool GTX560 TI using very slow silent 120m fan with a huge 3 slots cooler as well
sna1970 - Monday, November 28, 2011 - link
check those out , never wait for compaies to make your cooing for you :) decide which VGA you want then you make it silent !!!1- Thermalright (their coolers run passive and with silent 120 fans : http://www.thermalright.com/products/index.php?cat...
2- prolimatech : http://www.prolimatech.com/en/products/detail.asp?...
3- scythe : http://www.scythe-eu.com/en/products/vga-cooler/se...
these monster coolers can cool high end 6970, 580 cards with silent large fans , some can passively cool GTX 550Ti and ATI 6850
you can even use the case door fan in some cases and have a silent cooling for high end cards !!!
like this special design here (cooled 5870 card !!! without onkooler fans) :
http://www.thermalright.com/products/index.php?act...
this one makes the cooler face the door horizontally :) , so the door fan will take care of it
see the review
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/thermalrig...
FullHiSpeed - Monday, November 28, 2011 - link
There's no such thing as a passively cooled 100 watt chip in the same chassis with another 100 watts of CPU, etc., power dissipation. While massive heat-piped heat sinks can work wonders, they will still have their limits. I do thermal testing on various networking add-in boards, and it's a BIG DEAL when we change from a 10 watt ASIC to a 15 watt ASIC. We spec a certain minimum air-flow in LFM and/or a maximum ambient temperature. You better believe that these GPU monsters are going to need to breathe some fresh air. If you put a high powered "passively cooled" graphics card into a TOTALY passively cooled chassis, it's going to FRY unless you live in an igloo.