GPU Megat[H]read - the cores of wrath grew heavy on the die that day

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > GPU Megat[H]read - the cores of wrath grew heavy on the die that day

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Tab8715 posted:

Is there such a quiet video card? I don't know if it's just me but I find them obscenely loud.

There are passively cooled video cards, cards with only a big honking heat sink but no fans, but these tend to be mostly for the lower power video cards. For higher end cards there are ones with dual or triple fans which lower the noise a lot because they can run the individual fans at much lower RPM and get the same amount of airflow.

# ¿ May 12, 2012 18:39

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 05:25

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

spanko posted:

I feel like I can contribute a bit to this thread given my recent experience. I upgraded from a 24" 1920x1200 (ZR24W) monitor to a Korean 27" 2560x1440 monitor with the following specs:

i5 2500k @ 4.2
8GB ddr3 1600
SSD
GTX570

At 1920x1200 with the GTX570 everything was great, I played the following at completely maxed out settings, except where noted. I generally turn motion blur off in all games and bloom depending on the game because the implementation is terrible.

Witcher 2 (ubersampling, motion blur off)
BF3 (motion blur and bloom off, 4x AA)
WoW
SWToR
Skyrim
Tera

After upgrading to the 27" BF3, Witcher 2, and SWToR were no longer playable at 2560x1440 with the same settings and I had to turn some stuff down like AA to 2x or off, ambient occlusion off, bloom and depth of field off in SWToR, and anisotropic filtering off in BF3. Even with those settings there would be occasional unplayable drops in fps in those three games. The higher resolution of the 27" monitor made a huge difference in performance and my 570 ran significantly hotter and louder as well.

So I bought a GTX680 for $500 and I can now run all those games at 2560x1440 and completely max settings and they run better than they did on the 570 at 1900x1200. All that being said, I wouldn't recommend people buy a GTX680 now that 670s are out. It really doesn't look like its worth the extra $100 and I would have waited and got the 670 instead if I knew performance was going to be as close as it is.

So basically anyone considering those 27" Koreans on ebay keep this in mind. The monitors are fantastic and really cheap for what you get but don't expect to play games at high settings on anything less than the top tier of GPUs.

Why do you keep mentioning the nationality of the monitor? Why would that make any difference? Everything else that you've said is already covered in the OP.

# ¿ May 12, 2012 22:57

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Whale Cancer posted:

Do you guys think a 650 watt psu is plenty to power an i5 3570/660ti machine? I have no plans to overclock or run SLI. Power supply in question is the corsair AX650.

A better sized power supply for you is 450W.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2012 19:55

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Whale Cancer posted:

Wow thats well under what I was expecting. I thought 550 bare minimum.

In case you find my claim incredulous I'll back it up with some cold hard numbers. A good first order approximation of how much power you system needs is to add up the maximum power requirements of all your system components. In your case it's 77W(cpu) + 150W(660ti) + 50w(everything else) which gives you 277W. In the real world components don't actually hit their max quoted TDP power figures so this approximation can probably be reduced to something like 225W. This is right around the 50% sweet spot for a 400-450W power supply (power supplies tend to be most efficient at 50% usage).

For real world conformation of these numbers check out the anandtech review of the 660ti. At the wall they measured a power draw of ~310W in an overclocked sandy bridge E + 660ti system. Taking into account power supply efficiency that means the computer was pulling less than 300W (probably in the 280s or so) from the power supply. The processor you have uses way way less power than a SBE so my 225W estimate is about right.

Another thing that's important is that the idle power draw of your system because that's probably where you'll be spending the majority of your time. This is a bit harder to calculate but we can use the anandtech review as a guide. They clock their beast of a system at around 110W with a non overclocked non SBE processor and a 1200W beast of a power supply. Taking into account power supply efficiency as well as the power usage difference between an OCd SBE and your CPU I'd guess that you're going to idle at around 80W or less. With a 650W PSU like you were considering, your going to be below 20% usage (closer to 10%) which means your efficiency drops like a rock. With 400-450W PSU you're still below 20% but not nearly by so much.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2012 19:06

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Chuu posted:

I am on the verge of buying a GTX 680 for an upgrade from a HD4850 because I want to experiment with some CUDA apps, want to future-proof my system for a 27" monitor upgrade, and have money to burn. Some questions:

Is a 500W power supply enough for a system with a GTX 680, i5-2500, and one hard drive? I've seen posts recommending at minimum a 550W power supply but looking at these numbers it looks like total system power consumption never goes over 400W without overvolting.

What exactly triggers idle and long idle states?

Do superclocked cards effect idle states or idle power consumption meaningfully, assuming they are not overvolted? What if they are overvolted?

I've heard people say that these high powered cards dramatically effect their power bills. If I'm doing my math right, assuming 112W idle power consumption @ $0.142/kWh wouldn't running a computer 24/7 be only $11.45 a month at idle?

4. Currently cards don't typically run at idle speeds if you have dual or more monitors. In the worst case scenario your card could be running full speed at all times.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2012 20:30

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

What monitors are you running?

# ¿ Oct 14, 2012 19:15

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

sethsez posted:

This is a large part of it, mostly because videogames still don't have realistic motion blur, which is a huge part of why 24 FPS works as well as it does in film but looks like a jerky mess in games.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Motion blur is either completely missing or looks nothing like the real thing in all games I've ever seen. Lower frame rates just make games look jerky since there's nothing smoothing it out. If you want uncanny valley in games then heavy rain might be a contender, along with those nvidia dawn demos (not games but I'm going to consider all real time rendering).

# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 17:11

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Lord Dekks posted:

My wife's machine has a 7850 and while it runs games absolutely fine, for some reason chromes built in flash always causes a TDR, Firefox is fine with hardware acceleration turned off though. Everything else works perfectly, no corruption of any kind in games, gives nice performance.

We're past the point where we could RMA now as we originally thought it was just a Chrome/Flash issue but later versions (And drivers) didn't fix the problem and no one else with a similar card seems to have this issue.

Makes me wish we'd gone with a Nvidia but could just be we were hit with the one faulty card out of thousands. That said though it runs everything perfectly other than the bizarre flash issue, but next time I upgrade I'll probably go with Nvidia, while someone who had a bad 680 will probably swear their a Radeon person for life for now on.

I knew someone who would get TDRs non stop with his nvidia card and was driving him crazy until he finally figured out it was because he was streaming audio over hdmi. Once he turned that off and moved to using the sound card the problem disappeared.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 17:29

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Dominoes posted:

Wait, what? I'm about to upgrade from ATI to nvidia, and use HDMI for audio. Can anyone confirm/deny this problem?

This kind of stuff is all very driver/hardware related. Your best bet is to buy from somewhere with a nice return policy. For what it's worth this problem was a year to 2 years ago when 5xx series nvidia cards were the hot stuff. Also "all the time" in this respects means every several hours and I have no idea what brand card/monitor were involved.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2012 02:15

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Tab8715 posted:

Is the 670 actually a quiet card?

I feel that my 7850 is too loud.

The quietness of all cards depends on the cooling system attached, not the model family.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2013 09:00

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 05:25

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

dog nougat posted:

I keep seeing people talk about coil whine on their graphics cards. What's the difference between that and the fan just being loud because it's moving a lot of air?

Edit: I found this wikipedia article about it. I'd it really that loud/so prevalent that it's a big deal? I don't think I've ever noticed any sort of coil noise, just the fan being loud as gently caress on my 570 HD.

Different people have different frequency responses in their hearing. Your hearing also changes as you age, hence the prevalence of hearing aides among the elderly. The effect is also very hardware dependent so it's entirely possible you've never had a card that was very noisy in this way.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2013 22:19

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