When does the GPU to start to Throttle?

[zod96]

I got my GTX570HD. At 30% fan speed its very quiet. But if I leave it at that while gaming my card gets to about 90 degrees. And while playing it seems like my card starts to get a little choppy while playing BC2. At what temp would the card start t throttle or slow down my game play? Because when I set it to auto the fan speed gets to about 60% and its way way to loud for my tastes. Also when gaming with a ATI card like the 6870 or 6950, it seem like it plays it smoother than the GTX570 I know that sounds crazy but it really seems like that. Is BC2 more optimized for ATI than Nvidia?

 

[kamikazekyle]

Um, on the 570 it's around 97* celcius as max operating temperature, so I think it'd start throttling around there. If you're worried about temps vice fan speeds, you can create a custom fan profile using MSI Afterburner or the like. On some of my prior cards I smoothed out the fan speed curve a bit so my average temps were higher than the default fan speed, but still kept the GPU out of the critical zone. It helped to minimize noise but let the fan kick in if it really needed to cool down the card.

I can't answer the AMD vs nVidia quesiton since I don't play BC2, and Anand's benchmark area is FUBARed here at work. Though I'm sure you can do a quick google and get a comparison elsewhere.