Hey everyone, my old 8800GT died over the weekend which has accelerated my plans of replacing it with a new card. I'm kinda underwhelmed with the current crop of fanless video cards out there, so I shifted to look at low noise fanned cards. From SPCR's review, I'm leaning towards a 6850 with my eye on the MIS Cyclone 6850. I was curious if anyone here is currently using this card and could weigh in on how it sounds?

IIRC in "Silent mode" is relatively quiet (enough quiet at idle to be inaudible at 1mt, enough quiet at gaming load to not be heard over gaming sounds and CPU heatsink fan), probably the best sounding around (except the reference Sapphire, at idle), while it's noisy (at load) when run in "Power mode".

It should give a 30% edge over a Gigabyte Silent Cell 5770, would it worth for you?

Just bought the 6850 Cyclone myself, will let you know what it's like when I put the new rig together.

I bought the stock-clocked MSI R6850 Cyclone and have had the card running in my system for about a week, so I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about the card.

My current rig:
i5-760 (stock cooler)
P55M-UD2
Antec Solo
MSI R6850 Cyclone
Intel SSD
Enermax Liberty 500w PSU
1 Sycthe Kama PWM exhaust (running 300-600rpm)
1 800rpm Scythe Gentle Typhoon (soft mounted front intake)

The first thing I immediately noticed about the custom cooler is that the heatsink beneath the fan appears to be an exact copy of the Intel 1156 stock heatsink. This sandwiched between that heatsink and an aluminum plate are a pair of nickel heatpipes that wrap around the sides of the heatsink fan. The heatsink fan is the same size of Intel stock cooler fan, however the fan blades have a greater tilt than the stock cooler and there are nine blades to the Intel cooler's seven.

The card has a DIP switch to toggle the fan between performance & silent mode. I'm not sure how exactly the switch controls the fan speed (bios profile, voltage, etc). When the card is in silent mode, the fan idles at 1300prm and ramps up to about 2000rpm during gaming sessions. In performance mode, the fan runs more aggressively: 1500rpm at idle and about 2700rpm at load. No matter which profile is set, when the system was really stressed by Furmark/Prime95, the fan tops out at about 3000rpm.

In my system the card idles at about 38C and after 10 minutes of Furmark/Prime95 the card topped out at 77C. It typically runs at around 65C while gaming.

At idle, the gpu cooler adds nothing to the current noise coming from the PC at idle as far as I can tell. During normal gaming while the DIP switch is on 'Silent', I couldn't make out the gpu fan over the stock cooler as it ramped up with load. I'm interested to see if that changes once I swap the stock Intel cooler with a lower noise heatsink. When running Furmark, the Cyclone fan started becoming audible after about 2500~rpm. I was expecting to hear the same harsh high-pitched whine as the Intel cooler, however the sound was a bit smoother and whoosier.

I'm torn between this MSI R6850 Cyclone and the Asus EAH6850 DirectCU, which is said to be very quiet in the SPCR review.
Which is the quietest in your opinion?

Currently i have a Sapphire 4850 Vapor-X, which is practically inaudible when in idle..

Unfortunately a lot of people found the Asus 6850 to be louder than the SPCR sample was.

Thanks for the info!
I think I'll try the MSI then..

Otherwise, is there any other quiet 6850 worth looking at?

Can you tell me where it is located on the card? I bought one of these, but didn't see the DIP switch, nor did I see it documented. However, I have factory OC version, which I intend to underclock back to regular (the factory overstocked ones are made from same chips, but just perform better in real-world tests, so it makes them a little more robust even at normal speeds).

If you look at the top of the video card while it is installed in your case, you should see the dip switch above the righthand heatpipe. The switch is small and unfortunately MSI used a black switch on black PCB, so its tough to make out without good lighting. The sides of the switch are labeled 'S' and 'P' so you can tell which setting is which.

Got it. Thanks much. I ended up taking a flash photo of the switch and zooming in at it, so I could see it more clearly (already installed in my system). On my card, the words Performance and Silence are spelled out.

Is the power/silence mode switch exclusive to the R6850? or does the GTX 460 version have the same option?

I'm not sure which models do or don't have the switch other than the 6850.

Far as I can tell only the 2 Radeon Cyclone models have it.

I had a 6850 Cyclone PE once and I loved it. Such a brave little card. Loved the way it sounded. Wasnt totally quiet but far from annoying. Gentle whirr under load, no high pitched squeel. Quiet at iddle. Overclocked like a banshee too. Highly recommended.