Silent Ivy Bridge Build

[vailr]

GT430 is probably the most powerful passively cooled card - with other cards you will need an aftermarket cooler or water cooling to achieve anywhere near a silent setup.

OK, but: what about the OP's plan of using a yet unreleased Kepler mid-600 series card, that would be SILENT (fanless). Better or worse than a GT430?

 

[ElFenix]

asus makes a fanless 440.

technically fans are passive too - still have to work with the temp gradient. really all a fan does is blow air around, nothing is being cooled.


if you want something with no fans, you're going to need a more open computer case. you could leave the door off the side, but i'm guessing you weren't planning on doing that.

 

[lehtv]

OK, but: what about the OP's plan of using a yet unreleased Kepler mid-600 series card, that would be SILENT (fanless). Better or worse than a GT430?

Better presumably, but it'll still be in the same wattage bracket as GT430 so it won't be very powerful. I'm not sure how many programs can use 600 series CUDA effectively though, cos when anandtech released the GTX680 review, they said

For our fourth compute benchmark we wanted to reach out and grab something for CUDA, given the popularity of NVIDIA’s proprietary API. Unfortunately we were largely met with failure, for similar reasons as we were when the Radeon HD 7970 launched. Just as many OpenCL programs were hand optimized and didn’t know what to do with the Southern Islands architecture, many CUDA applications didn’t know what to do with GK104 and its Compute Capability 3.0 feature set.

So with application and driver updates, 600 series should probably be better for CUDA than 400 or 500 series.

 

[mfenn]

@mfenn:
So: which video card (regardless of it's power consumption) would you rate highest for the OP's stated GPU workload?
Then work down the comparison chart from there, for the best SILENT (fanless) card.

Video card? GTX 580, easily. It is full Fermi hardware. The current "Little Kepler" is not really very good for compute, as they have stripped out most of the compute features in favor of raw gaming performance. The upcoming "Big Kepler" will add those back in and should be a monster.

Of course, the true card to get is a Tesla C2090, as that one isn't crippled at the driver level like the GeForces are. Of course, that is kind of moot as it is way outside of the OP's budget.

 

[mfenn]

To clarify my workload:

It's solving systems of several hundred ODEs each with different parameter combinations. So, I don't think that requires much in the way of memory bandwidth. Single or double precision isn't a big deal as single precision is typically precise enough since I'm working on a ms time scale.

I can run your CUDA code on our Tesla M2090's and give you the timing results. PM me if you're interested.

 

[vailr]

@mfenn:
The only SILENT (fanless) nVidia 500 series cards on Newegg are some GT 520's, and also three $630+ water cooled GTX 580's.
What number designation would this "Big Kepler" card likely carry?

 

[piasabird]

Check this article on the front page . . .

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5814/asrock-highend-vision-3d-252b-htpc-review

This HTPC is using a Motherboard with an i-5 Mobile processor. It says the intitial test at idle is running at about 20 watts.

I cant say that is the answer but it might run a lot cooler.

I saw some kind of info on MSI having some kind of similar motherboard but it is built for industrial use.

http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage...board-for-Mobile-Intel-Ivy-Bridge-CPUs-3.jpg/

 

[mfenn]

@mfenn:
The only SILENT (fanless) nVidia 500 series cards on Newegg are some GT 520's, and also three $630+ water cooled GTX 580's.

Yes, that was pretty much my point. Silent and good GPGPU performance don't go together.

What number designation would this "Big Kepler" card likely carry?

Unknown. Rumor has it that it will be the GTX 685, but given that this is Nvidia we're talking about, they will probably call it a GTX 780. It's NOT going to be a huge improvement over the GTX 680 for gaming, its strengths are in its ridiculous memory bandwidth, memory capacity, and huge double-precision performance.

 

[vailr]

Originally Posted by vailr
@mfenn:
The only SILENT (fanless) nVidia 500 series cards on Newegg are some GT 520's, and also three $630+ water cooled GTX 580's.
Yes, that was pretty much my point. Silent and good GPGPU performance don't go together.

Well, I suppose the OP could pay $630+ for a water cooled GTX 580, while using a quiet water pump to cool it. Might also need something like a 10 gallon capacity coolant tank in order to avoid the need for noisy cooling fans.

 

[wsaenotsock]

in my experience, high quality and very low RPM chassis and CPU fans are almost as good as fanless systems. quiet enough to not notice over 3 feet away from the system. If the fans are software controlled and running under 1000 RPM they are hard to hear even and still keep the temps low. also removing fan grilles helps reduce noise also.

just something to think about.