I want to buy a nVidia card to use with Adobe professional software (Premiere, AE, PS mainly) which currently only support CUDA so nVidia only.
The requirement is for silence so I figure I will need to install a 3rd party heatsink/fan(s) such as the Accelero TWIN TURBO II.
Three questions:

1. Which after market GPU air coolers (no water for me) should I be looking at apart from the Accelero TWIN TURBO II? They need to work with the 550/560 cards and also hopefully the GTX 680 and lesser future 6 series cards.
2. What is a realistic maximum TDP to be looking at?
3. Is it easy to under clock and/or under volt these cards? Is the data held after a reboot?

Notes:
1. I’m thinking of under clocking/volting as it’s possible that there is no obvious GPU that meets the as to be determined TDP threshold so buying a higher TDP card and running it below spec might be the best option.
2. Performance. Adobe CS5.5 doesn’t typically seem to scale beyond 192 cores for H.264 video but CS6 is due very soon which might change that so I’d like some headroom.
3. Cost. I’m not chasing every last drop of performance so not looking beyond the GTX 560 Ti 448 which already has a very high TDP.
4. The GTX 680 is a mixed bag for Compute performance but it still appears to offer the best performance per watt. Its way outside of my budget so I’m wondering if there is any solid info on when to expect the lesser Kepler GPUs?
5. Does the GTX 560 Ti 448 make more sense over the vanilla 560 Ti due to having a larger die size so having a larger area to dissipate heat? This assumes they would both be TDP limited by me under clocking/volting.

Now you can turn the knob up to 300 (W)

Don't have answers to the other q's.

Yikes, that’s a lot of watts dude!

After doing some research it seems as if 150W is an achievable figure especially as the only other major heat source will be an over-clocked Ivy Bridge i7 at stock voltage or slightly above.
So I’m looking at a GTX 560 TI, either the Palit Twin Light Turbo or the Gainward Phantom as they both seem to use the same design which is very quiet. I may be able to get away with using the stock cooling especially if I connect the dual fans to an external controller.
Given that the Palit version is ~£7 more than the cheapest 560 Ti it makes sense to try that rather than buy the cheapest card and add a £35 3rd party cooler. Hopefully I can save money and time and potentially not invalidate the warranty also.

The other option is the MSI Twin Frozr as that cooler reviews well and I believe you can lower the fan speeds a lot. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the Asus cards which seem to have an unnecessarily high lower limit which results in low idle temps but too much noise.

Review of the Palit: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Pali ... rbo/1.html

The Gainward Phantom from sources such as this one http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-gainward-gtx-560ti-phantom-40nm-4100mhz-gddr5-gpu-835mhz-shader-1670mhz-384-cores-hdmi-plusfree- looks to be slightly cheaper than the Palit. The MSI Twin Frozr seems to me to be more of an out and out gamers card, it is more overclocked than the mildly tuned Phantom. Where the Phantom will differ is in its load performance, Gainward very definitely trade higher GPU temps for lower fan speeds and less load noise.

Thanks for the info. I did look over the weekend and the Palit and Gainward cards are within £5 of each other. I’d probably go with the Palit as that was the one I read the review of; it was the cheaper as well which is a bonus.
I looked at the MSI card because it seemingly allows a lot of control over fan speeds via their software. My impression is that I’d be unlikely to get the same low noise level at load even after tweaking the fan speeds. Probably because the fans are inherently noisier rather than the design is weaker but that’s a guess.

I can see two potential issues with the Palit/Gainward cards:

1. Is it possible to tweak the fan speeds at idle so that it is silent in my case? This assumes that it is not silent enough at stock; silence at idle is more important than a light noise under load.
2. Due to the fans being internal if they are too loud they may well be much harder or impossible to easily replace than for cards with fans external to the heatsink.

The other issue with the GTX 560 Ti is that it is not officially supported by Adobe although it will work. The GTX 570 is supported and there have been some good deals for it recently (~£185) but it would require buying an after market cooler.
So I may wait until CS6 is released which should be May/June and see what the situation is then with regard official Adobe support under CS6 and more Keplers might be out by then. If I’m going to use an unsupported card I’d rather use a Kepler.

Current rumor is mid-range 660 Keplers in May and <$200 cards in June.

I wonder how the midrange keplers will compare against the 560 in cuda applications. There`s no doubt that the keplers will be a lot more efficient in games but in other applications, who knows.

I think I would prefer the phantom to the palit card for one reason: the heatsink of the phantom is flat making a fan swap much easier.

The GTX 680 is doing fine with CUDA in CS5.5 according to the users on the Adobe forums: http://forums.adobe.com/community/premi ... iscussions
My impression is that MPEG2 gains more under CUDA than H.264 although that may be a limitation of the benchmark that people are using. H.264 doesn’t seem to scale much beyond 192 ‘old skool’ CUDA cores.


Thanks for that observation as it might be a significant one. I wonder if it’s possible to swap out the fan on the Phantom with a regular fan or would you need to remove the frame?

After looking at the card more carefully I think that swapping the stock fans would require taking the card apart since they`re sandwiched between the card and heatsink. So I was probably wrong in saying that a fan swap would be easy. A replacement fan would fit nicely on top of the cooler though, better than on heatsinks with odd shapes. The card wιll end up taking 3 or 4 slot after this mod, something to keep in mind if you`re using a μatx case.

The Phantom II GTX 680 has now been released. Gainward have set the two 80mm fans to idle at about 1000 rpm and under load run up to around 2000 rpm max. See http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26768-gainward-gtx-680-phantom-2gb-tested/26768-gainward-gtx-680-phantom-2gb-tested?start=11.

The Palit Jetstream's heatsink looks pretty flat to me: Large Pic, Review in googlenglish

The Palit JetStream GTX 680 is essentially a performance version of the silence-orientated Gainward Phantom II. The Phantom II has two 80mm fans; the JetStream the same basic cooler with two 80mm and one 92mm fan. But the question I suppose is how loud are two 80mm fans at 1000 rpm? Loud enough to merit replacing the fans? That said, as far as I can see Gainward/Palit's warranty sticker on the back of the circuit board is over one of the cooler mounting screws, so as long as you can remove the existing fans without taking off the cooler then the warranty should be unaffected. The JetStream is a much easier proposition for a fan swap because the fans are in a cover over the cooler and not under it like the Phantom II.

Yes, somehow I had the impression that the fans in the jetstream were embedded but I stand corrected, it`s pretty clear from the pictures that the H/S is flat, making it a good candidate for a fan swap.

On the other hand, the Phantom has received favorable comments so far. 1000rpm at idle is pretty low, if the fans are half decent this could be quiet enough out of the box.

Review of the Jetstream at Techpowerup. For an overclocked card, power draw is low:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Pali ... et_Stream/