Cerb's GTX 970 Performance/Watt Discussion

[Qwertilot]

Yes, you need to be careful about which cooler you get

Cerb (and I) would discount the set of cards above due to making too much (ie any!) noise at idle That's easy. Suspect very likely too 'noisy' at full tilt too.

The noise levels on the TriX look absolutely fine for most people - especially from the market who'd get a full on high end graphics card - but you're dealing with noise fanatics here.

The basic physics is impossible to argue with of course. If you've got a cooler that can keep a card with X heat output cool quietly, then you put on a card with lower heat output you can turn the fans down (so less noise) and still keep it cool.

For an extreme case, I'd be amazed if that cooler couldn't passively cool a 750ti! Could quite possibly do the same for a 960.

Mostly there only seems to be any sort of NV bias here as they're currently managing to run cards with mid range power draw vs AMD's top end stuff Hopefully that'll sort itself.

 

[Cerb]

Obviously, there are some differences depending on which cards you compare to which.

Which is why I have made a specific point of comparing only against two specific series of cards, the Asus Strix, and MSI Gaming (though with Gigabyte deserving an honorable mention for their custom voltage regs, that are allowing their constant-on fans to not need to ramp up so much), and not all GM204 cards. The only EVGA that do the same at idle hasn't been re-reviewed by any site I know of, since it did not have the feature in question at release, and its load noise sucks compared to most, anyway.

But it proves the point there is no magical Maxwell sauce that results in lower noise across the board.

That's what the lower load power results are for, since there aren't any other replicated measurements to work from. I have not once stated there is any special sauce that makes Maxwell universally quieter; only that there is special sauce that has allowed all of 3 willing companies to make it quieter; and of those 3, 2 also make cheaper versions that don't share such cooling, and 1 still keeps the fans spinning, at RPMs I'd rather avoid (for low loading).

An MSI GTX 970 4GD5T, FI, would be no better for my wants than a Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290, and in some ways worse (requires warranty voiding to fully adjust fan curve and voltages), unless I was ready to dive into water.

You have to take each cooler on a case by case basis to determine which will be the quietest and it's pure foolishness to discount the 290 because it uses 30-40 watts more when there are oustanding coolers like the Tri-X and Vapor-X available that fully compensate for the heat generation and then some.

Except I have already shown at least three separate reviews sets, including [H], that measures by using, not benchmarking, that a 60W difference is on the low end (HardOCP, FI, gets a 75WDC difference).