SPCR

Did anybody tried this cooler? If so is it quiet? Do you have another gtx 570 that is quiet?

Thanks,
Yoav

Gainward can be relied on to come up with some interesting variations on standard coolers, and the Phantom is one of them. It is mildly overclocked at 750MHz and seems to be the quietest GTX 570 out there right now. It sells for a premium over the cheaper cards such as the MSI GTX 570 OC which has the standard 'blower' fan. But a GTX 570 is a fairly powerful gaming card, so if you were playing games with it could you hear any fan noise anyway?

I still didn't buy the gtx 570, and that is why I asking in the forum to verify that it is indeed reasonably quiet.
Do you think that the Asus DirectCu version is quiter?

This review http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS ... II/22.html suggests that under normal loading it is significantly quieter than the stock cooler.

ballcall2 wrote:Did anybody tried this cooler?

Ask to him (and refer to us, please).

That is me

Silent during usual working day, but gets a little noisy when gaming (but then you cant hear it anyway over the game).

It has increased in noise since adding a second screen, and have just posted for advice on a second GPU for this.

lodestar wrote:This review http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS ... II/22.html suggests that under normal loading it is significantly quieter than the stock cooler.

I don't know about the stock cooler, but this card isn't quiet when idle. See my post here.

Ahhhh but the Phantom is...

Well I've got hold of one of these and so far I'm pretty impressed. The sound from the cooler is much smoother than the stock cooler. At idle, no, it isn't silent. But it is quiet, and it's much quieter than the stock cooler; quieter even than the stock cooler BIOS modded to a minimum fan speed of 30%.

What's got me more impressed though is that with a custom fan profile it'll happily chug along in Furmark and hold the GPU at around 90C with the fan speed barely above the minimum (~35-36%). This is in a very cramped case for such a card (PC-Q08, mini-ITX). The same test with a stock cooler the fan was around 60% to keep the core at the same temperature. With the same fan profile and a more sane benchmark such as Unigine Heaven the GPU core is around 75C with the fan at 32%; this is more like what I'm expecting from the sorts of games I'm going to play on it (there's only so much entertainment one can get from watching furry doughnuts after all!).

Lastly, someone asked in some other thread how tall the Phantom is. The answer is 46mm, give or take a millimetre.

It is a great card.

I wonder what two of the smaller 560 Phantom's would perform like in the sound stakes - even just one would make a good gaming case.

I have had this card for quite a while now, and love it - I hardly know my PC is on