third party coolers on these ?

Has anyone got any experience with the stock fan noise of either the 6970 or the 570.
I'll grab whichever is quietest at idle!
(I am not bothered by a bit of fan noise during a game)

Also - totally unrelated - are either of these cards flexible/productive/useful at accelerating H.264/x264 encoding?

The short videos at the bottom of this page from the Hardware Heaven review may help http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1084/pg21/xfx-radeon-6970-and-radeon-6950-graphics-card-review-power-temp-noise.html in terms of load noise. I would suspect that at idle either of them is likely to be effectively silent in a normal gaming machine.

this gpu also supports a 'negitive feedback' control to keep the gpu within a certain power envelope. According to Anandtech it does not adjust voltages, but will only adjust clockspeeds. The neat thing is though you can set a thermal envelope to lower then stock settings (between 200 and 300 watts).

Its something that may be handy when you really dont want noise during some gaming sessions. It sucks it does not support voltage tweaking yet, but it may well in the future. This is really a big step for us that like toreally tweak every aspect of our computers.

thankyou amd!

That TDP feedback control (AMD calls it PowerTune) could be a real boon to silent PCs.

Think about the 5750 which had a stock version that required a PSU power connector because it went over 75W. Powercolor made a GoGreen version with more expensive components to keep the power draw below 75W but the card costs more to the consumer.

Now with the newer cards (I suppose we'll have to wait for summer 2011 for mid range cards with PowerTune) you can use the stock circuitry put a quieter fan on it or go fanless, then turn down the PowerTune setting and bam you have a quieter card.

Imagine buying a video card without having to mod it and still being able to make it quiter just with the use of the driver control panel.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds ... -hd-6950/9 shows us



The key here is it isn't in Watts, it is in percentage. So this sort of control will be just as useful for 75W cards as it is for 200W cards. I'm not sure if it works with the 6850/6870 but it should work with all the 69xx cards and with the 7xxx and later cards in the future.

I wish they would do Hybrid Power for desktops (turn off the discreet GPU and just use on-board when not gaming).

i thought crossfireX on certain 7xxg series chipsets already supported this to an extent?

It allows you to do Hybrid Crossfire which is using the on-board and the discreet GPU in a Crossfire configuration. The performance boost from using the on-board is usually negligible so it is more for convenience than performance. Unfortunately the graphics card does not shut down completely so still uses whatever idle power it normally does. On laptops the discreet GPU turns off completely.

PS. I don't know how Hybrid Crossfire deals with different amounts of memory for the on-board and the graphics card. The 6xx0 series come with 2GB of memory and presumably in a hybrid config you don't need to dedicate 2GB of your PC's main RAM to the on-board.