Skynet wants YOU!

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by Sight Unseen

Hmm, I bought the fast fans with the intention of using pwm, and they are quite near silent, keeping my pc cool even when running at full load. I can stand about 1m away and barely hear it. In my experience, super fast fans at like 40% duty cycle are just as quiet as those "silent" fans but move much more air at a given speed because they're made not to be crazy loud even when at full speed.

Silence is an interesting concept, since it's almost impossible to achieve with a decent gaming rig, seeing how any good GPU generates loads of heat, and usually needs to be actively cooled. Water cooling is the closest one can get to absolute quiet, but it's expensive and somewhat hazardous, considering how water really isn't the best thing to have inside a complex electric contraption such as the computer.

Most noise made by fans is usually the air in itself moving, which creates the sort of steady hum that isn't really all that irritating to ears, compared to resonating parts, HDD read sounds and whining fan rotors. Still, I have this obsession about having my computer as quiet as possible, while still having decent hardware to run games and other stuff.

the GTX275 isn't old, it still holds out against the upper midrange of the current generation, even at 1920x1080. I would upgrade for DX11 but I'm not made of money. It took me like 3 years of saving to get my current hardware. And yes, I have no doubt that my GPU is a bottleneck for gaming. However, this isn't just a gaming box. I also do a lot of stuff thats really CPU intensive on it, like running distributed HPC apps, transcoding video, audio recording and post-production stuff, photo editing, etc.

Old is a really subjective term when it comes to hardware. I agree that it's still a good GPU for gaming, but when I read stuff about hardware and how often people buy stuff, I get the kind of picture how some people upgrade their computers on like 6 months interval, like a guy with Thuban CPU wanted to buy Sandy Bridge because he had an upgrade itch. Even my HD 6870 is already too slow to fully power some truly mad games out there, but it was a major improvement over my old HD 4830. I just hope that my current config will be sufficient for the next 4 years or so.