As some of you know, I’m becoming a bit obsessive about computer noise. As these digital demons take over our world[1], the noise of small spinning fans is heard everywhere. In my workplace of computer networks and communications equipment, the ongoing battle between processor power and thermodynamics is pretty much the central front in our new product development.
Consumer PC’s generally follow a case design and cooling standard that is diagrammed nicely below. The image is locally hosted from the image at CustomPCBuild.Com.
Image from CustomPCBuild.Com
The primary element of all of this airflow are a plethora of fans. Although some PC builders streamline this all down to a single fan for case flow, power supply and the CPU, it’s pretty common for a PC to have at least one fan in the power supply (exhausting hot air, upper left on diagram), one on the CPU heat-sink (center swirl on the diagram) and one on the graphics processor (GPU) heat sink. These are three major power consumers in the PC, which is why they have the fans. To eliminate the fan on the CPU or on the power supply requires some pretty exotic approaches including water cooling, large external passive heat sinks or even submerging your PC in mineral oil.
The best we mere mortals (with a budget) can do, is to use as few as possible of the largest diameter fans[2] we can fit and running them only as fast as needed. Power supplies can be purchased with various size fans (and a multitude of air flows). 3rd party coolers can be had for CPU, GPU, etc, but I’m conservative enough to avoid modifying my electronic equipment from the way the manufacturer intended. [3] However, there are times when the manufacturer helps you out by producing an alternate design.
Video card fans in particular are problematic, because they tend to be small, high RPM noisy little buggers and always the first component to fail on the card. If you are regularly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge cards, the limited lifecycle of the fan is of no concern. I, however, tend to choose my upgrades a bit more strategically and ride the knee in the technology vs. cost curve. As a result, I tend to get several years out of my components which tends to be longer than the little spinning beasties will last. As a result, about 6 years back I resolved to stop buying video cards with fans without giving up too much performance. Each of these cards were in the $85-$150 range at their time of purchase. [4]
The first of these cards was the PCI-E Asus 6600GT Silencer (can’t find how much I paid, but estimate $125 in Feb. 2006). Beyond the fact that it sports a red shiny heat-sink, the top finned section rotates out away from the plane of the card to form a space-aged heat-sink nacelle Scotty would be proud of.
That swing-arm allows the heat sink to be positioned over the CPU fan to make use of the air flow in that area. The bummer is that with the newer CPUs running so close to thermal limits some cases (including mine) provide a ducted air inlet to supply fresh cool ‘outside’ air to the CPU heat exchanger. This, of course, produces a bit of a mechanical conflict with the unit.
The second in my series was purchased to correct this problem and get a boost in video performance for a few newer games. The Gigabyte is a 7600GS series card with a heat sink inline with the neighboring card slot ($165 on 10 Dec. 2006). The unit takes up two card slots in the chassis, but doesn’t extend beyond the PCI/PCI-E footprint in the PC.
You can clearly see the front and back side mounted heat-sinks and the heat pipe used to transfer the energy between them. The heat sink ends in a panel mount assembly which fits into the external location for the neighboring card slot.
My most recent acquisition, and a significant upgrade in performance, is the Asus 9600GT Silent ($85 after MIR 01 Jul. 2009). This unit has a beast of a heat sink assembly that also takes up the neighboring slot.
This is the first card I’ve had which supports PCI-E 2.0 although my mainboard doesn’t. It’s ok though, because it’s backwards compatible and in general the difference in capability isn’t needed yet.
So what about performance? How do my last three video cards compare? Well it happens that I found some old X3:Reunion Demo benchmarking data for my 6600 card at the time I upgraded to the 7600. I collected additional statistics (SupremeCommander and 3DMark06) for the 7600 to 9600 transition. The results are tabulated below. You can see that the X3 Demo is effectively CPU limited on my machine (P4 3.4GHz, 4 GB RAM) to the high 40′s for average frame rate. 3DMARK data is only available for before and after the most recent upgrade, and clearly shows an increase in graphics performance of 2-3x.[5] I’m not sure how to interpret the Supreme Commander numbers, since the number of frames doubled, but the rendering score only went up by ~30%. In total, the improvement to the 9600GT is significant even with the PCI-E 1.0 limit of my mainboard. This gives some hope that my next mainboard/CPU upgrade won’t be a total throw away like last time. [6]
| Test | 6600GT | 7600GS | 9600GT |
|---|---|---|---|
| X3: 1024x768x32 NoAA,NoAI, High | 35.1 | - | - |
| X3: 1024x768x32 4xAA,4xAI, High | 26.1 | 42.3 | 48.9 |
| X3: 1920x1080x32 4xAA,4xAI, High | - | 29.8 | 47.2 |
| 3DMARK06 (SM2.0) | - | 1286 | 2714 |
| 3DMARK06 (HDR/SM3.0) | - | 1175 | 3390 |
| 3DMARK06 (CPU) | - | 1047 | 1049 |
| 3DMARK06 (Total) | - | 2997 | 5932 |
| Supreme Commander (Sim) | - | 7950 | 7878 |
| Supreme Commander (Render) | - | 6051 | 7804 |
| Supreme Commander (Frames) | - | 7635 | 15134 |
| Supreme Commander (Total) | - | 14000 | 15682 |
As far as I can determine, this 9600GT based fan-less video card is as powerful as you can go without a fan. Technically, it is SLI capable, so you could theoretically run two of them in parallel. I’m thinking you’d need a pretty beefy case fan at that point. Of course case fans are less customized (read as: cheaper) and can be much larger in diameter.
Oh… if you’re in the market for a silent PCI-E graphics card in good condition, let me know.
- All hail our Benevolent Binary Overlords! [↩]
- Large fans can turn slower for the same flow rate of air. A slower rotation rate means the pitches being produced will (generally) be lower. Lower pitches tend to propagate less effectively and be less annoying. Slow moving also means less bearing and motor wear for longer life and less bearing noise. [↩]
- Perhaps this reflects what I recognize to be a significant amount of thermal-mechanical design dollars that went into the original designs. [↩]
- In fact, the 9600GT was the cheapest of the three… it will be $85 after the mail in rebate comes back. It’s currently out of stock at Newegg. [↩]
- Shout out to David Millington’s blog on how to unpack and view 3DMARK06 files. Simply stated, they’re zip files in disguise… change the extension and unzip ‘em. This is useful because clicking through to the 3DMark website tells you that it can’t read the files in the old version. [↩]
- Of course last time it was also the AGP to PCI-E upgrade, so the video also had to go. I also converted completely over to SATA for the hard disks also at that point. [↩]
July 28th, 2009 at 9:35 am
*sigh* Our computer room (with its three systems running nearly all the time) is nothing but the whine and whir of spinning fans. All. The. Time. Our PCs were built about three years ago, so we’re kinda due for upgrades. But it’s well back on the “after Heidi finds a job” burner.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Well let me know if either of these would save you any whirring. Although with three computers you might consider a central cooling solution (like chill the room to 0C and turn the fans off). Of course you’ll have to wear a parka… or vent the PC exhaust directly into your pajamas.
August 1st, 2009 at 2:03 am
As I like to say, “Technology should be seen and not heard…in fact, I’m beginning to wonder if it should even be seen.”
March 10th, 2010 at 12:15 am
[...] living room location of this box, and the low-graphics intensive activities. I re-used one of my silent video cards from my gaming box. It’s a Gigabyte 7600GS which is not generally available for sale any [...]