Quiet and Cool. Which card?

[Fun Guy]

I am looking for the most advanced card I can get while staying as quiet and cool as possible. What should I be looking at?

 

[SolMiester]

Budget?, what is your current system?, what resolution is your monitor?

 

[iiiankiii]

I am looking for the most advanced card I can get while staying as quiet and cool as possible. What should I be looking at?

Here you go. TITAN X EVGA HYBRID

 

[Fun Guy]

Budget?, what is your current system?, what resolution is your monitor?

Good questions. New system. Running a triple monitor setup like this one, with a 2560 x 1600 in the middle, and two 1200 x 1600s on the sides:

I'd like to stay under $300, under $200 would be ideal.

Since I am not gaming, just need a solid card for editing video and photos, and scientific writing.

 

[Leyawiin]

I am looking for the most advanced card I can get while staying as quiet and cool as possible. What should I be looking at?

What are you planning on doing with it?

 

[Mako88]

Here you go. TITAN X EVGA HYBRID

There you go, question answered.

I had a Titan X Hybrid briefly last month and it was wonderful. Didn't open up any more MHz as heat isn't the main barrier with GM200, but it was so so quiet and much easier than a custom closed loop option.

I would assume the Fury X would also work extremely well, slightly less overclocking headroom will lead to it being roughly -10% to -15% slower than an overclock 980 Ti, but it's close enough to consider.

 

[NTMBK]

What video and photo editing apps are you using? If you use pro apps, it might be worth buying a Quadro for the professional OpenGL drivers- K2200 would be a nice choice, though a little outside your budget range. Other than that, a Geforce 970 is probably a good choice (as long as you pick one with a good cooler).

Bear in mind that your graphics card might not be the main limiting factor in video editing. What is your current setup? Do you have a good storage subsystem (fast hard drives in RAID, or a large SSD)? How much RAM is in your system? What is your CPU?

 

[Headfoot]

EDIT: saw you're not gaming

 

[96Firebird]

I believe Radeon's have better PLP multi-monitor support, look into that.

 

[Stuka87]

$300 is a tight budget for triple head gaming.

What will you be playing? Any pro apps? Basically what people said above me

 

[Stuka87]

I believe Radeon's have better PLP multi-monitor support, look into that.

Yup. Actually not sure if nVidia ever added mixed mode multi-display support. Last I checked, they didn't (Which was about a month ago for another post here).

 

[Headfoot]

If this is for gaming, no way he's going to get playable FPS on $300 on 3 monitors. If he games, it would have to be on the center 2560x1600 alone.

EDIT: He's not gaming guys, I see that in his post now above. Missed it at first.

What professional programs do you use?

 

[Fun Guy]

What is PLP? Anyway, like I said above, we can assume I will not be gaming. This will mostly be a work computer.

 

[xthetenth]

portrait-landscape-portrait.

 

[Headfoot]

Which programs do you use?

This is important because certain applications can be accelerated by nVidia CUDA (no AMD card will function here) and some by OpenCL which AMD excels at.

 

[Fun Guy]

Which programs do you use?

This is important because certain applications can be accelerated by nVidia CUDA (no AMD card will function here) and some by OpenCL which AMD excels at.

Not sure yet - I've only dabbled by putting a toe in the water with Premiere (video) and Photoshop (photo), so I am not beholden to any programs right now. Any suggestions?

 

[Rvenger]

$300 budget?

R9 290/390

PLP support is better on AMD.

 

[RussianSensation]

What is PLP? Anyway, like I said above, we can assume I will not be gaming. This will mostly be a work computer.

SAPPHIRE FleX 100322FLEX Radeon HD 6450 fanless - $55

"Sapphire FleX Technology simplifies AMD’s multi-monitor Eyefinity solution by allowing 3 X DVI monitors to be connected to the board ‘out of the box’ WITHOUT the requirement for expensive DisplayPort monitors or Active Adapters."

1x Single Link DVI (1600x1200 monitor)
1x Dual Link DVI (2560x1600 middle monitor)
1x included HDMI to DVI adapter (1600x1200 monitor)

----
Alternatively,

You can basically take almost any AMD HD5000 series or higher with dual DVI ports (1 of those is always dual-link DVI) and just add a ~$25 certified active DisplayPort/MiniDP to DVI adapter (depending on what the card has for its DisplayPort config).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121925

However, that $55 Sapphire Flex card should work too since it's a special feature Sapphire FLEX cards have.

 

[shady28]

Not sure yet - I've only dabbled by putting a toe in the water with Premiere (video) and Photoshop (photo), so I am not beholden to any programs right now. Any suggestions?

Really you are probably asking in the wrong place. An A/V forum and site with people who are dedicated to that aspect of GPUs would be better - the Adobe forums if you're planning to use their products has a hardware section. Yours is a very common question there and not easily answered.

The normal logic used here about video cards doesn't work well when talking about video encoding / decoding and editing. For example, if you have an i7 quad core then you probably can't make full use of even a midrange video card in Premiere. You need a 6-core

You may find this useful :

http://ppbm7.com/

This link is the best reference on video cards with Premiere :

http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page/92-what-video-card-to-use

 

[Piroko]

The Radeon HD380 / HD285 (same chip) is probably your best bet. It should support your monitor setup just fine, fits your budget nicely and has the fastest video decode/encode engine from all AMD GPUs. That should help with the effects that are supported by GPU acceleration.
Alternatively, the card to get on Nvidias side would be the GTX960 for the same reasons. Fits your budget and has a fast video decode/encode engine. No idea about the monitor setup though.

 

[BD231]

Wt

 

[Fun Guy]

The Radeon HD380 / HD285 (same chip) is probably your best bet. It should support your monitor setup just fine, fits your budget nicely and has the fastest video decode/encode engine from all AMD GPUs. That should help with the effects that are supported by GPU acceleration.
Alternatively, the card to get on Nvidias side would be the GTX960 for the same reasons. Fits your budget and has a fast video decode/encode engine. No idea about the monitor setup though.

Interesting. Taking this into account, I assembled a table comparing the two:

They're pretty close... I like the 70W cooler GTX 960, but the double bus width of the R9 380 is cool, too.

 

[Piroko]

Well, the Radeon has ZeroFan (Fans stop spinning as long as the card is below 50°C, which is essentially every long idle period) and it has higher theoretical processing power, but the 960 is no slouch either in practice. So, pick your poison.

 

[shady28]

Direct comparison of hardware specs between two different architectures is fairly useless. Doing that would show an r9 290 being 'better' than a GTX 980, after all the R9 290 has a 512 bit bus vs 256 bit on the 980, and has far more SPs than the 980 has CUDA cores. Same thing between say a Snapdragon 800 quad core 2.3Ghz SoC vs an 1.4Ghz dual core Apple A8.

The R9 380 just doesn't have very many media related benchmarks, and when you do find comparisons they're usually not quite apples to apples. For example this compares a 4GB 380 to a 2GB 960 :

Then you have ComputeMark which shows around 35% advantage to the R9 380, but this one uses more VRAM.

http://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.ph...deon-r9-390x-390-und-380-im-test.html?start=9

Then you get stuff like this :

or this :

So the question comes back to the same old thing - what software are you going to use?