Will this cause ears to bleed.?

[andyb]

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/386 ... 5x-cooler/

I suspect that it will.

No matter how good 40mm fans can be, having 5 (five) of them sucking air through a very long fin stack and expelling it away from the motherboard is going to require quite a lot of pressure, which in turn means high spin speed. Even 1 (one) 40mm fan running at 4,000 or more RPM can be very annoying if not due to the overall noise level then due to the high pitched tone that it creates, what will 5 (five) of these little fans sound like.?

Have the engineers at gigabyte created a small miracle with this card, or will it be another dust-buster but with a horribly high pitched noise that will drive everyone insane.?

I will be very interested to read the reviews of this card to find this out.


Andy

[ces]

The target customers of this board are, I suspect, unlikely to care about the noise.

[andyb]

The target customers of this board are, I suspect, unlikely to care about the noise.

Perhaps, although I am certain that the market for "performance at any noise level/quality" is now very small, 5-years ago the market for very noisy products was still large, and 10-years ago that would cover most of the market - now however there is a very small market "of people" who will put up with such horribly noisy products that in the past would have been considered "acceptable".


Andy

[PMcG]

That thing is just ridiculous. Graphics cards are going lower power so why do you need a stupid cooler like that just to cool the core?

[andyb]

That thing is just ridiculous.

And I suspect very loud for its relative performance compared to other cooling solutions for overclocked GTX 680's.

Graphics cards are going lower power so why do you need a stupid cooler like that just to cool the core?

Generally they are, but at the top end they still have a power limit of ~275W, with the reference GTX 680 using a maximum of ~220, that does require a potent cooling solution. This design must be bad noise-wise regardless of how good it is performance-wise. The reference GTX 680 is not a noisy card (relatively), and there are/will be many other GTX 680 solutions that will be much quieter than the reference design, this horrible 5-fan design using notoriously whiny 40mm fans has got to be repulsive....... unless someone has managed to do some miracle work to keep it cool AND quiet,

Also note: Its not just the core that needs cooling, its the numerous memory chips and very complex power circuitry that needs to be cooled as well, the core is of course of utmost importance but to put the whole card vs core into perspective, I estimate (guess really that the GPU uses between 2/3 and 3/4 of the power of the whole card (145W - 165W, I suspect nearer 145W), this means that attention to cooling needs to be given to several parts of the power circuitry and the RAM chips and not just the GPU.


Andy