I am looking to get a 5770 for a hackintosh build.

Am I better off with a silent cell or another card with another card and adding on a cooler?

Do some brands run cooler or idle at lower temperatures/clock speeds?

what coolers would best suit an under used 5770? are there difficulties in connecting a 120mm fan to the fan header of a graphics card to have it speed controlled?

I will not be gaming and the most demand my card will see is two HD movies playing at the same time and some flash in multiple browsers.

The 5770 is the lowest power graphics card that can display to 3 monitors that has good comparability for hackintosh please don't try and sell me on another card unless you have good familiarity with hackintoshes. If you do I would be happy to be sold on buying a cheaper, lower powered card.

Thanks a lot for your help.

If you are determined to get a 5770, then get the Silent cell. You won't have to muck around with a 3rd party cooler, you'll keep the warranty active and I doubt it'll generate much heat (~25W) doing the 2D work you want to do.

I'd use Arctic Cooling's Twin Turbo Pro, it has 3 and 4-pin connectors on its fan cable as well as molex to 12v, 7v, and 5v adapters.

If you're looking for a stock option that saves power without sacrificing much performance, PowerColor makes a passive 5750 with a heatsink that's VERY similar to the Accelero S1.

I know it's not a 5770 but it doesn't need to connect to the power supply either, it's gets all its power from the motherboard.

http://www.powercolor.com/global/produc ... asp?id=214

Is it compatible?

First off thanks to both of you.

Good points. also I realized the price is about the same as if I got a cheap card and added on cooler. The only thing is there is no fan header so I will always need to have my case fans fast enough to cool at it's maximum usage. Are one or two slow moving intake fans enough to cool a 5770?




I think you are right on about the cooler. I would prefer to use that 5750 as it is the lowest end card that supports output to 3 monitors. Unfortunately hackintosh doesn't support it well. Apple sells the 5770 and the 5870 and getting anything else to work is difficult. This is my first hackintosh build and I want to do as little custom editing of config files as possible. It's hard enough custom editing my xorg.config file to get onboard and add on graphic to work on my linux box and there is way more documentation.

-->Are one or two slow moving intake fans enough to cool a 5770?<--

Well, your condition is 2D only...so max, that's 25W. You could probably be fanless in the case and dissipate 25W. So, any airflow at all is probably just fine.

I did some more research. Someone on here said they have the silent cell running in a card with low air flow and it runs cool in 3D apps.

I figure I should run some serious 3D stress testing and get the fans at a speed where the video card is within 10 degrees of it's thermal limits so it will run super cool all the time.

Oh, one last thing....it WILL chew up more power than the average 2D test because when you run multiple monitors, the memclock does NOT downclock. That's about 30W extra over one monitor apps when idle (what I see in my setup). So that 25W estimate earlier....might be 40W. Anyway, it'll be fine.

Barely; It comes with a wide heatsink for the top two RAM chips that allows the heatpipes to cross over it, I had to drill a hole to clear a capacitor that got in the way.

If you can fit an Accelero Extreme in your case it will perform even better at the same noise level. I'm not even using the memory sinks and they're idling at 38c with the fans locked at 30%.

IIRC it could have issues even with DVI casings (if any), on the 5770s.
But above all, does the standard AC TT Pro mounting kit fits its rather unusual 43x43mm holes pitch?

I think this all makes the silent cell a good choice. I just ordered it.

I word on multimonitor setups:
I have been using two monitors as soon as Windows 98 allowed it. about a year ago I decided that I could benefit from a third monitor. IT's nice but not as useful as I expected. also it has really been a pain in the ass to configure in many ways. If I stayed at two monitors my build could use on-chip graphics.

I've been using two 24" monitors side by side for a couple of years now. I find it very handy and am able to view all of the content w/o moving my head. I think that's the limit, though.

Yes, it did.

Nice to know that they're wrong about it: http://www.arctic.ac/en/support/support/detail/question/93-will-accelero-twinturbo-pro-fit-my-card.htm .