SPCR

For years I've had a noisy computer and find myself finally wanting to try to make a quiet computer. I saw that the Radeon 7750 (sapphire) has a fanless version. It appears that they can be setup in crossfire. Has anyone tried doing it yet and had success? Or am I better off getting a slightly beefier card like the 7850 and adding custom cooling (but the noise level suddenly goes up).
Thanks for any advice/thoughts!

matty wrote:For years I've had a noisy computer and find myself finally wanting to try to make a quiet computer. I saw that the Radeon 7750 (sapphire) has a fanless version. It appears that they can be setup in crossfire. Has anyone tried doing it yet and had success? Or am I better off getting a slightly beefier card like the 7850 and adding custom cooling (but the noise level suddenly goes up).
Thanks for any advice/thoughts!

You're better off with a single faster card. The 7750 isn't that fast. My 6950 at idle is inaudible @ 1M but of course you might be in a quieter room.

If you are talking about the SAPPHIRE ULTIMATE HD 7750 1GB GDDR5, I would double check the Crossfire support on that card. Even if support is there, it looks like the passive heatsink would block the connection.

In general, the 7850 is faster than the 7750 in crossfire. While it's not passive, some of the OEM solutions are pretty quiet and you don't have to deal with any pain associated with getting crossfire to work in your specific games.

Thanks for the advice. Looking around at my other components to make my computer quieter as well. (after years I'm finally playing around with the fan settings in the bios) Currently I have a 5850 in my machine so the 7750 would really be a downgrade anyway. In general the card is quiet, but the odd time playing games (e.g. Tera), things can get noisier. Obviously another solution is to turn down the ingame settings to reduce pressure/heat on the card. For now I think I'll look at quiet 7850s.

Maybe a stupid question but...is a beefier videocard able to run quieter/lower_temp at the same settings as a lesser videocard? e.g. if I play a game on medium settings on a 5850 and those same settings on a 7850, is it a safe assumption that, all other things being equal, the 7850 (or 7970) should run cooler (and probably quieter)?

Let me answer a different question

Are the 7xxx cards more power efficient than the 5xxx cards? Yes. Newer, smaller lithography process and newer architectures means it takes less work to do the same load. Compare the 7850 to the 5850 in Techpowerup's review. 10W vs 25W at idle and 88W vs 120W for an average 3D load.

Less power used to perform the same function means less heat to remove. Less heat means less cooling needed.