Hi all,

Have a new Fractal R3 w/ front & back 120mm. Unfortunately, it doesn't cool my Asus HD4850 Matrix quite as well, and I can no longer run it underclocked to 300MHz with the fan spun down (fan insists on ~2000RPM for 10 seconds every few minutes).

I'm trying to find a 560, 560Ti, 6850 or 6870 that I can run silently. That is, at idle (maybe underclocked a bit) the fan is either lower noise than the R3 fans at ~1000rpm so I can't hear it, or the card runs with the fans spun down.

Load noise isn't a biggie, so long as it is reasonable. I can cope with a few dB increase.

Any ideas? What are these like:
- Asus 6870 DirectCU
- MSI 6870 Twin Frozr II
- EVGA 560 w/ what looks like stock cooler

The Gainward Phantom 560Ti is one of the quietest on the market. Unfortunately, Gainward don't sell their products in all parts of the globe. So they are not available in Canada or the United States. They do sell them in Australia for example http://www.computeronline.com.au/products.php?C_ID=8&M_ID=566&PROD=35837&PHPSESSID=&?PHPSESSID=230be869487ad3fed2a89f5d51702895 but I have no idea about New Zealand.

What I did was buy the cheapest 6850, then attach an accelero twin turbo pro. The fans are very quiet and they spin slowly.

What sucks about living in NZ is the high prices on everything.

Hmm... the aftermarket coolers are quite expensive, especially considering you can get the DirectCU, Frozr and Windforce models for similar price to the cheapest.

Can any of these stock (or the Accelero, even) idle with no fans and stable, reasonable temps?

I can't tell from your post: Is the fan spinning up due to thermal rise or is it just spinning up due to asus firmware oddities? If the latter, and you don't have a thermal issue, why not disconnect the fan from the gpu header and hook it up to a separate fan controller?

Thermal rise, unfortunately. If I disconnect the fan, the card will eventually reach 65-70c idle in the new case (vs. ~50-55c in the old). While the baseline is definitely a lot quieter with the R3, the constant spinup of the noisy GPU fan is far more annoying.

65-70C idle when passive, huh? I wonder if you could still pull off a fixed rpm modification that would be a good compromise between thermals and noise at a comfortable level...it'd be the cheaper solution. Fanmate for control, or fixed voltage: 5V, 7V...

Regardless of the choice (my mod, an aftermarket cooler, another card), passive at idle probably isn't the answer. Can't-be-heard should be the target.

Hi, I have a Gigabyte GTX560 Ti OC, think it's their Windforce cooler on it, was the cheapest GTX560 anyway
As stock it's loud, the fans are thin and equivalent of 80mm fans in size and minimum speed was around 1700rpm, or maybe more, and quite noticeable, under load would get over 2500rpm, admittedly with great temps as the the under lying quad heatpipe heatsink isn't bad at all.
First step was a BIOS mod to drop the minimum fanspeed to 25%, and then 20% which made no diff to25%, this helped a good deal but...
Next step was to remove the stock fans and replace them, i used a pair of 2000rpm Sharkoon "golfballs" but any 80mm fan in this speed range would work. Fans connected to the cards 3pin fan header so it still has control of them. They take the card from 2 slot to 3 slot solution but now idles around 500rpm! As the fans are reasonable this is quieter than you'll ever hear. Under load they climb to 1200-1400 rpm but this is still quite acceptable.
With the BIOS mod allowing low fan speeds you could then also use MSI Afterburner (or the like) to redefine the fan speed curve to alter the noise/temp trade off.

So with fanswap (£10 for 2x 80mm fans) and BIOS mod it's now quieter under full load (folding@home) than used to be at idle.

I'm still going to try a Twin Turbo II on it though!

I read someone on here quoting the GTX560Ti Phantom as having 80mm fans with idle in the 1000-1200rpm range, which isn't as good as my modded card but probably better than any other GTX560Ti.

Regards. Seb
[Edit for fan speeds having looked at my notes]