Hello,
I have been a long time lurker of this forum and I need your help. Does anyone know if the Radeon 9500 Pro video card has a loud fan? Or if anyone can comment about other Radeon cards stock fan noise levels.

Thanks!

My experience with video card fans is that they are mostly quiet when new, but get very noisy very quickly as they accumulate all the dust and stuff inside your computer. It seems the ATI fans are pretty quiet usually. I tried an MSI GF3-500ti out of the box and it was quite loud to begin with.

You ar eprobably best putting a Zalman heatpipe on the card so that you can run it without any fans (or with a slow 80mm fan). Make sure the card has holes to mount the heatpipe. If not, then you can always use a ZM17 with a slow 80mm fan.

I have a Gigabyte Radeon 9000 Pro, and that one is pretty quiet as well, I agree about them building up a lot of dust quickly just keep some canned air handy

hey here's my input.

i had radeon 8500 with fan. sucker was loud. anyways, here's the bottomline: you've been lurking in this forum for so long, and that tells me you want a very quiet system.... now in that case, v-card fan should be first or second on your list to replace with a zalman counterpart.

perhaps fans on other cards were undervolted.... but in any case, i can only assume that 9500pro fan will be loud (according to this forum's standard).

I'm also a lurker, but have just registered.

I've been pretty happy with the two Radeon 9000 cards I have (not the 9000 Pro). They don't have a fan since they run at a lower clock speed than the Pro. But if you are doing gaming, etc, the reduced performance might be a problem. But for regular stuff, they are decent cards with good DVI support for approx US $90-$100, although the 9000 Pro is basically the same price.

Good luck,
Mark

FWIW, I tried three of these ATI 9000's in my rigs which both already have working ATI DVI graphics cards in them. I couldn't get the DVI-out of these 9000's to work, no matter what I tried. Sapphire (the people who build these 9000"s) tech-support was absolutely no help either. I finally gave up.

hey ralf,

i also have sapphire edition.

i couldn't get the card working at any resolution below the native windows resolution. meaning i couldn't see anything until i'm finally booted up to windows. it really doesn't matter for me since i rarely turn off my computer... but it does linger in the back of my mind telling me my computer is not flawless.

anyways, just wait until your computer boots up, it should work fine.

if you must get into bios at some point, just switch to the crt mode temporarily and everything should work just fine.

No way. I spend a lot of time in DOS and I'm in my BIOS several times per week and I'm not going to shut down, swap cables around and reboot every time I need to do this. My Radeon 7500 and 8500 DVI works fine, if they can't design the 9000 to work other than when Windows is loaded, they can keep their card. Which they did. I tried three, hoping that it was a defective card but they all worked the same. It makes me leery about getting a 9500 or 9700 if the DVI is going to work the same way as the 9000.

Noticed that there are a few modded Radeons being sold on ebay with the Zalman HS already attached. This is a cheaper option than the Saphire.

Based on that, can I assume that the 9500 Pro has the required mounting holes for the Zalman 80A? Maybe a dumb question, but I want to make sure before I pick up the HS. I've had trouble finding a definitive answer to this question, for some reason.

Quick answer: Yes it has the necessary mounting holes.


All 9500Pro that I'm aware of have these holes and use them to fit their reteil fans. I don't think there would be *any* 9500Pro without mounting holes.
I'm gonna get one too at the end of the month or so... the one I'm looking for (read: the cheapest - saphire radeon9500 Pro 128MB retail) is not available yet :-/, neither do I have the money *gg*

So have fun with this card!

Ralf,
I understand your reluctance to trust 9000 and later cards re: DVI.

But my experience has (fortunately) been quite different from yours and even Sung's. Both of my LCD monitors (19" Dell -> Samsung, and 18" Sony) handle DVI and VGA, as does the Radeon, and due to various reasons I've had to exercise all permutations of connecting the cards to the monitors. They all worked fine in both initial BIOS bootup and under Windows, with the one exception of the Sony VGA being fed by the Radeon DVI, where it does have sync problems in the initial BIOS screen.

I've got to imagine it would mostly be a hardware sync issue, and since both of my monitors are fairly new models they might be a little more forgiving towards a less than perfect DVI implementation.

And I've also been doing clean installs of Windows, so I definitely wouldn't have run across any driver upgrade issues like you might have with your pre-existing ATI cards.

But with all the advances in heatpipe coolers for video cards, it sounds like going with a low-end 9000 or Matrox card just to avoid fans is necessary anymore.

--Mark

I've spent a decent amount of time using a system with an 8500le which can have sync issues with DVI-D output in combination with a Philips 17" lcd. The simple solution was to hook up both the VGA and DVI interfaces to the philips display.

DVI and most LCD digital interfaces were really designed to be used at a fixed resolution. Generally the digital interface scaling is pretty poor. For example when running at odd resolutions such as 1280x960 ( the only 1280 option for Counter-Strike) the digital scaling will result in noticable artifacts ( I've seen this with a variety of video cards and LCDs). In general the analog scalers are much better than the digital scalers. Although in both cases ( digital and analog) you will get a much better display using the prime resolution.