Passive Cooling - Heat Concerns

[P220ST]

For the love of quiet I've been considering a passively cooled video card.

I've (of course) been researching this stuff. Of course, passive cooling gives one the risk:benefit of power/heat:silence.

The Asus EN series, depending on who rates it and how, gives an average idle/load of:
Power - 130W/200W
Heat - 60C/80C

Is 80C anything to worry about in a fan-cooled system?

Thanks again for your time.

Take Care,
-P220ST

GEAR LIST
CoolerMaster WaveMaster TAC-T01 Mid-Tower, Intel D975XBX2KR "Bad Axe 2" Mobo, Thermaltake Toughpower 750W W0117RU Power, Intel® Core™2 Duo 2.4GHz Desktop Processor E6600, Corsair 4GB [2(2 x 1GB kit)] VS2GBKIT667D2 5300 DDR2 SDRAM, Asus EN Series Video Card, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro External sound card, PreSonus Firebox Firewire audio interface/sound card recording system, 4 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 16MB cache HDDs, Seagate ST3500601XS-RK eSATA 500-GB External Hard Drive.

 

[P220ST]

Sorry, if you have suggestions outside of the Asus EN line, do tell.

Again, thanks.

-P220ST

 

[Nelviticus]

Any card you can buy will have enough cooling to cope with what the card can do. The flip side of this is that, generally speaking, a passively-cooled card can't do as much as an actively-cooled one (of an equivalent generation/type), i.e. they tend not to be as powerful.

The bottom line is that unless you buy some expensive third-party crazy cooling solution, you can have either quiet or powerful but not both. You need to make up your mind which you want.

As an example of what heat is acceptable, my work PC has an nVidia GeForce 6200 and the default setting in the driver is to slow it down if the temperature goes above 130 C. I doubt it's powerful enough to get that hot though.

Nelviticus

 

[P220ST]

Can't I have my cake and eat it too?

When I'm doing my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) stuff it's rare, rare, rare, that I'd concurrently be into DVE complex enough to engage my video card. And it's a dual boot, so if I'm goofing off playing a game, all I'm doing is playing a game. But we're just talking about power availability here in segregated, or if you like, embedded subsystems. The heat thing is the real drag. If you can fry an egg in there, you can fry an egg anwhere in there. Hence my pursuit of a video card that's efficient in the Newtonian sense. One that doesn't willy-nilly convert so much energy into heat (versus work).

I'm trying to work out a function or algorhythm that plugs in Power & Heat(idle), Power & Heat(load), FPS of some common game and uses those 5 variables with some constant to get us back onto the same page and out the other side of the "equals" sign comes an efficiency rating. because know it or not, that's what most consumers really need to know, not just their frames/sec.

At any rate, thanks for taking the time to write back. It helps move me forward and I appreciate it.

Take Care,
-P220ST

 

[Nelviticus]

I was reading an article the other day in Custom PC (a UK mag) that reviewed the performance and power consumption of all the graphics cards you can buy today. Obviously there were loads and loads of figures but I'll post you a selection - the first figure is average FPS is at 1280x1024 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R and the second is power consumption (peak power for the whole PC while running 3DMark06).

[tt]GeForce 8800 Ultra: 57 312W
GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB): 48 249W
Radeon HD 2900XT: 41 355W
Radeon X1950XT: 26 289W
GeForce 7600GT: 16 178W[/tt]

They're fairly artificial benchmarks but hopefully that's some use to you.

Nelviticus

 

[P220ST]

Wow! Do I just suffer from budding awareness or is this super-300W consumption thing relatively new? I hope they are efficient or we can fry up a lot of burgers in there. Thanks for the numbers. Hard to admit: I'm a numbers kinda guy. They turn chaos into order for me and that I like. I think I peaked emotionally around age 7.

Anyway, I seem to be settling in on the passive 8600GT series. Asus and Gigabyte have dueling cards (silent but deadly) in that mid-range. I'm having trouble sorting out if there's much difference outside of aesthetics and fit. Fit's turning out to be a bit of a bother with that silent Zalman CPU cooler twirling about on its ball bearings.

Thanks again for the input. Are you pretty confident in that, historically at least, graphics companies are on the up and up where tolerances are concerned? I mean, it's not like buggy software, pseudo-beta releases of something that's going to result in a miserable afternoon for me, nothing worse. This puppy melts and it's melted. But re the buggy software, you know about that stuff. Hell you're a programmer are you not? You must have competitors who in a race to market would frisbee toss whatever out to the swarming masses for a mass-encore of the BSOD. I'm a lowly physician. Useless on this forum.

Take Care,
-P220ST

CoolerMaster WaveMaster TAC-T01 Mid-Tower, Intel D975XBX2KR "Bad Axe 2" Mobo, Thermaltake Toughpower 750W W0117RU Power, Intel® Core™2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Desktop Processor, Corsair 4GB [2(2 x 1GB kit)] VS2GBKIT667D2 5300 DDR2 SDRAM, passive 8600GT Graphics Card, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro External sound card, PreSonus Firebox Firewire audio interface/sound card recording system, 4 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 16MB cache HDDs, Seagate ST3500601XS-RK eSATA 500-GB External Hard Drive. Zalman CNPS9700 NT CPU Cooler/3+1 Zalman ZM-F1 Fans.

 

[Nelviticus]

It's worth noting that those power figures are for the whole PC, not just the gfx card, and they were the peak amounts during a high-stress benchmark test. Nevertheless they give some indication of which cards are the more power-hungry.

I haven't heard many good things said about nVidia's new 8500 and 8600 cards - you can generally get a more powerful older card for the money. However they're not terrible, and if you can get them passively-cooled then all the better.

Personally I wouldn't worry about cards overheating unless you're going to overclock them. Reputation is very important in the world of gfx cards and if any vendor sold cards that overheated their rep would suffer badly. I'm not saying it can't happen, and you can always get a faulty card from time to time, but it's in vendors' interests to sell their cards with adequate cooling.

Nelviticus

 

[pmonett]

I have an 8600 GTS card and its fan is quite silent. 80°C is a warning temp for me - I try and keep it below 70°C if at all possible.

I used to be part of the watercooling scene, watercooling is incredibly efficient and there is simply no match as far as silence and efficiency is concerned. There are now quite a few solutions that can be adapted.

I had a 4600TI that I put watercooling on. The graphics card never got above 50°C and operation was just about as silent as can be.

The new cards are quite demanding in energy dissipation, but somehow the designers have managed to keep them cool without resorting to using banshee fans or the like, so I have not found any real reason to go back to watercooling the video cards. CPUs also have very well-performing HSFs, so my watercooling kit is, for the moment, relegated to storage.

I am quite demanding as far as silence is concerned. Trust me when I say that today's hardware is generally quiet enough not to warrant the additional expense (well, if you don't buy low-range, that is). At most, I'm ready to buy a better HSF for the CPU. The graphic card I have now is very quiet - independent of its power.

Pascal.


I've got nothing to hide, and I'd very much like to keep that away from prying eyes.

 

[P220ST]

Pascal,

Thank you for your time. I sincerely appreciate it.

Please take a gander at my hardware profile. dB versus degrees, how does it look?

-P220ST

CoolerMaster WaveMaster TAC-T01 Mid-Tower, Intel D975XBX2KR Bad Axe 2 Mobo, Thermaltake Toughpower 750W W0117RU Power, Intel® Core™2 Duo 2.4GHz Desktop Processor E6600, Corsair 4GB [2(2 x 1GB kit)] VS2GBKIT667D2 5300 DDR2 SDRAM, NVidia 8600GTS Graphics, PreSonus Firebox Firewire audio interface/sound card recording system, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro, 4 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 16MB cache HDDs. Seagate External 750GB Backup.

"Good character is inherent to the rarest of men. In the masses good character is situationally dependent.

 

[pmonett]

Well, let's see. A Thermaltake 750W, a Core 2 Duo 6600, an 8600 GTS, and 4 Seagate drives.

Seems like we have a very similar setup - actually the differences are in the fact that I have a Zeus 850W Passive Cooling PSU, and my 4 Seagate drives consist of two 350GB and two 200GB.

For the rest, the CPU, video, audio are the same.

So I guess I think your rig is pretty darn good ;-).

Pascal.


I've got nothing to hide, and I'd very much like to keep that away from prying eyes.

 

[ATLMatt]

You can pretty much replace every cooling device in your rig with passive cooling and have it still run decently. You defiantly have the right CPU for it, the Core 2 line runs incredibly cool for the power it has, I think you would have no problem converting over.

You could always slap a couple of 120mm+ fans in your case, and run them at really low RPM, they would still move some air, but if they are good quality fans you wouldn't hear anything.