Pete,
I got Nvidia 280 GTX - for about $450. I would have gone ATI (more bang for the buck), the one thing that stopped me was high idle power consumption. Let me elaborate:
I am looking for a quiet system, and probably 90% of time the system is idle (as far as GPU is concerned, displaying 2D Windows XP screen). I play some 3D games about 10% of the time, and one of my favorite of the past, Oblivion, runs best on 280).
Anyway, now, regarding this quiet system - the 280 has so far proven all but quiet, despite the low power consumption claims. While this could be te driver issue, or something, the end result I am seeing is that when going into 3D, and fan speed on automatic, the card switches to a lawn mower mode (on its own). Switching back to 2D does not turn off the lawnmower mode...
When I go to the fan settings, and manually set fan speed to say 50%, which is very quiet, what I get (in 3D) is this on and off lawnmower mode. On and off, sometimes 5 seconds on and back off. It is infuriating.
Ok, one way to deal with that was to set the fan speed to about 75% - which is audible but tolerable - and under this scenario, the lawnmower mode (100%) does not happen very frequently.
Well, needless to say, the noise has proven to be a big disappointment, and I have not started addressing it (possibly with 3rd party utilities.
Joe
PS: My old 7900 card's fan did spin a little faster in loaded 3D mode, but nothing really that noticeable. So I don't really know what's normal. Maybe the old 7900 was too quiet, or maybe the fan control was defective, and maybe the resulting heat killed the card... |
