The NOT so quiet 7900GTX

[narcan]

One of the reasons I bought my MSI 7900GTX was the fact it was quiet or so I thought. After experiencing some artifacting on a particulairly hot day, I start to investigate. I found my fancontroller didn't work and it was at 25% all the time. I used RivaTuner to set the fan at 75% and low and behold my problems dissappeared and I even had a little headroom, it isn't exactly quiet anymore (at 100% it's very loud).

I read alot of posts here about how quiet the 7900GTX is and was wondering if there are others with this problem (you can check with RivaTuner). I'm also wondering if anyone has found a fix for the fancontroller so it autoswitches again, and yes the gtx is suppossed to have a working fan controller, the GT doesn't (except for one eVGA model).

 

[Captante]

I have an X1900XTX with the stock HS/fan & although I was expecting the worst when I bought it as far as noise levels, so far its been very quiet, in fact its inaudible over my low-RPM case fans 90% of the time... its only after several hours of Oblivion that it becomes noticible at all & before anyone says it, my system is pretty quiet.
Two things to keep in mind, first & foremost the cooling setup & resulting airflow in your case has a huge effect on how hot all internal components get (I have a full-tower Lian-Li server case) & second MANY of the comments regarding Nvidia vs ATI here on AT need to be taken with a grain of salt because people have either only heard one card & not the other, or are biased.

One thing I will say though, is that fan on the XTX at 100% speed is insanely loud, in fact anything above 75% is pretty bad ... I don't know how anyone could stand it all the time.