So, for someone that has never owned a gpu, is it accurate to say that most 7950's are fairly quiet? I am buying one this week for the first time and I definitely dont want a loud one.
Nope. Well, you
can get them to be relatively quiet but only if you run them at lousy hash rates . I've tried a bunch of different brands and none are actually quiet. Remember that you're turning ~200W of power into heat on a tiny piece of silicon so it's going to get very hot and you're going to need a lot of airflow to cool it. Airflow ~= noise.
My experience:
- XFX single fan 7950 sounds like a jet engine even at 50% fan. It's picky about overclocking and struggles to do 600KHs but needs tons of case cooling and it's still LOUD.
- Sapphire Vapor-X 7950 cools well, runs pretty fast, but doesn't handle undervolting well. Does about 630KH/s.
- Sapphire Dual-X 7950 cools pretty well, a bit louder than vapor-X and will do 670KH/s.
- MSI Dual Frozr 7950 is my favorite. Fans cool really well and it'll sustain 690KH/s. Still loud at that level but also stable.
I also have a Dual-X 7970 that'll do 730KH/s (it'll run 750KH for a day or so but crashes miserably, needing a hard reboot) but I'd stick with the MSI 7950s. Also, I can't get my Sapphires to down-volt though I haven't tried loading new BIOS either.
Last comment: My 2-month old Vapor-X had a fan bearing fail the other day so it barely spins. Amazon is sending me a replacement but this is the first GPU I've seen go bad so keep an eye on them.