Like I said before, we aren’t talking about after-market vs stock, we’re talking about blower vs open. Nobody is denying that an aftermarket solution with better fan(s) and more mass won’t do a better job than a stock blower with the GPU side of things.
After-market cards = open air designs 99% of the time, excluding very few examples such as HIS IceQ 7950 series. In this particular thread, the after-market cards are 99% assumed to be open-air designs. It's implicit in the discussion. My point is they run quieter and cooler and allow for overclocking without having 95*C on a reference blower card or having to blast the reference blower card at full speed to keep the GPU at 70-80*C.
You can never achieve this level of noise with your GTX680 reference card in games:
Asus DirectCUII 670 Noise levels whisper quiet.
^
this card is quieter at full load than your card is at idle.
The point - as has already been shown – is that an aftermarket blower is almost as effective, without dumping heat into the case, so it’s better overall. If I was going after-market then I'd still be go the blower route.
No, you haven't shown this to be true at all. You stated an opinion with no facts to back it up. I linked professional reviews, scientific testing done by professional website and many users on this very forum will testify that after-market GPU cooler are far superior in noise levels and temperatures to 99.9% of blower fan cards. No reference blower design made since GeForce 8800GTS 320mb can compete with after-market coolers on high-end GPUs such as your 680.
You realize a person can set up a custom fan curve on an open-cooler and make their card way quieter than your can ever make yours? Why? Because the heatsink on the after-market card is usually 15-30*C more effective than a stock reference one. I can drop my fan speeds to 40% and still stay under 80*C. Your card is 100% working at much louder noise levels and temperatures at 40%.
It doesn’t matter how good your airflow is, open designs cook components close to them.
Not true. In a well ventilated case, an open air design has almost no effect on temperatures near the CPU, motherboard or hard drives. You can only make such an uneducated statement if you have never had a modern case with good airflow or have never used an open air designed card in your life. It sounds like you never have because you would never make such a statement.
Even scientific evidence proves you wrong. Motherboard temperatures were lower with MSI 7970 Lightning than HD7970 Reference card. This is because the PCB, VRMs and the GPU of the 7970 Lightning card run much cooler as the heat is being dumped into the case and quickly exhausted by the case fans. The heat from the VRMs and reference PCB of the 7970 rises towards the CPU. See 1st page of this thread for proof.
Witness how many open-air designs fail when the top card is getting cooked by the bottom one. Many cases also have PCIex1 right above PEG, so anything sitting there will also get cooked without a blower.
If you have cramped setup that needs 2-3 GPUs and the PCIe slots do not have 3 slot spacing, a reference blower design is recommended.
This is because in such a setup is blatantly obvious that 2.5 slot after-market open air designs would not get sufficient airflow. If however you have a 2 slot after-market open design card and sufficient space between them, the GPU will not cook and won't cook the components as you keep implying.
It’s cute how you assume overclocking is somehow a guaranteed and automatic right. It’s not that I choose not to overclock, it’s that you choose to run your hardware outside spec and take your chances thereof.
I never said overclocking is guaranteed. I even provided a range for 7950 as an example of 25-40%.
Hundreds of people overclock safely. If you know what you are doing you will not ruin your hardware. My GPU operates way under specified stock voltage of Tahiti XT silicon and my card runs coolers and quiet despite a 1150mhz overclock. There are far quieter cards than mine such as PowerColor PCS+, Asus DirectCUII, etc.
Regardless, even without overclocking, after-market open air designs are quieter and cooler than 99.9% of reference blower designs. In modern cases, there is not much compromise as you keep implying based on your opinion. Not to mention, I took the most extreme examples of 300-500W of heat being dumped into the case. Cards such as GTX680 only use 180-190W of power in after-market form. That's nothing for a modern case with good airflow to deal with. Since it appears you have never used an open-air after-market card, your statements that they heat up the case and cook components are based on nothing but a myth and not real world evidence.
Keep in mind your GPU at load is louder than a modern case with quiet fans. That means if someone buys an after-market open style GPU such as Asus DirectCUII, the case will be the loudest part of the system and case fans are FAR quieter than reference blower fans.
It’s simply staggering the amount of people that post on forums when they have a problem without even considering stock speeds first. Because if the GPU stops responding, it must be a driver problem, right?
Derailing the thread into the art of overclocking? If you don't know how to overclock responsibly and safely it is your option but do not generalize that all overclocks are unstable and result in broken systems. This is why stress-testing software exists to test the stability of GPU and CPU overclocks. Again, the reason why so many enthusiasts prefer after-market open air designs is because the system runs much cooler and quieter overall with such a scenario assuming you have a modern case with good airflow. Being able to overclock with after-market open air coolers is an added bonus.
Ah yes, Intel gets praised for making power-efficient CPUs, yet the first thing people do is turn them into Bulldozer-style furnaces. I’m not interesting in mounting a 1KG cooler just to stop load temperatures hitting 95C, thanks.
Ok, but this forum is not BestBuy. No one tells you to overclock but other people do. If someone wants to push their Core i7 to 4.0ghz or 5.0ghz, it's their option. Under these circumstances, a stock Intel heatsink is worthless.
I have my Core i7 860 overclocked to 3.9ghz with a single Scythe Flex fan on Prolimatech Megahalems and the CPU temperatures ranged between 61-64*C in Prime95 / Seti@Home. After-market tower heatsinks are also vastly superior to stock Intel heatsink. If you don't want to overclock, no problem.
Just because you think 1 kg cooler is unsafe, it has nothing to do with reality. Modern sockets have no problems supporting 1-1.5 kg with a backplate and coolers such as Thermalright Silver Arrow, Prolimatech Megahalems, NH-D14 work perfectly fine at quiet noise levels. I guess you are implying that everyone else who uses them is breaking their components/motherboard?
I run a Prolimatech Lynx with a single fan, and its speed doesn’t exceed 850RPM when running the heaviest LinPack loads, and the CPU stays below 53C too. Under normal loads (e.g. gaming) the fan speed usually stays below 600RPM/45C.
You can run a Thermalright HR-02/Macho without any fan at all and keep a Core i5 2500K stable at stock speeds in a modern case with good airflow. The temperatures will be higher but it seems you are concerned more about noise levels, right? You can have a quiet overclocked i5 / i7 CPU at 4.5ghz but it would mean a much superior cooling, even Corsair H80 or NH-D14. Those can run very quiet as well with a fan controller.
You know why your argument continues to fall apart?
Reference fan blowers such as GTX680 are 99.9% louder than high-end after-market fans that come with the best after-market coolers:
Thermalright TY-140 at full fan speed is quieter than your 680 is at idle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scDWaxFxe7M
You keep implying that case fans and after-market coolers will spin at higher fan speeds but what you fail to account is that all of those after-market open air GPUs and tower CPU coolers will
all run much quieter than your GTX680 ever will. So it doesn't matter than TY-140 spins at full blast since it's quieter than your videocard.
I couldn’t do that with your overclocked monstrosity, nor could I do it with an open air GPU dropping 300W right under my processor.
First of all you just said you do not overclock. That means using an after-market GTX680 open-air design card. For example, MSI TF GTX680 peaks at
177W in games.
Secondly, the fact that you say you 'couldn't do that' already shows you've never done it. So your opinion is based on a myth that you keep believing. There is no way that the noise levels of a GTX680 reference blower card or 580 you had or any other GeForce you had will be lower than the higher noise level of a quiet after-market case/CPU tower cooler fan + after-market open-air design GPU. This is because at full load in games, the leaf blower design is louder than the loudest case/CPU cooler or after-market GPU fan in a modern system.
The fact that you are not getting this is mind-boggling to me. I just linked earlier that GTX670 DCUII at full load sounds quieter than GTX680 reference does at full idle. A gamer can equip his entire system with quieter fans than your GTX680 runs at full load. The cumulative noise level will be much lower since your GPU is the loudest component. How do you not get this?
I already run my case fans at 800RPM, and my CPU fan at 500RPM-600RPM most of the time. I couldn’t do that with an open air design because everything else would be getting cooked.
How loud is your GPU in games? It doesn't matter at all how quiet the rest of your system is if the loudest component is the GPU. A similar system with after-market case fans, hybrid PSU and after-market open air design would come in with lower noise levels than your GPU in aggregate.
Dust always gets in regardless of how good your filters are. Then it clogs your PSU, GPU, fan bearings, and anything else that moves. And once it gets in, it can never be completely removed, no matter how much compressed air you use.
A lot of us clean our towers. My PSU fan intake is facing the floor. I've used this setup on my Corsair 520W for 5 years and barely any dust gets in it. 30 seconds of compressed air cleans all of the dust from the PSU that I do once a year. I can even take a picture of my 5 year old "dusty" PSU and it looks nearly brand new inside because it was mounted with the fan facing the floor.
The GPUs are easily cleaned and the same for CPU towers. Your CPU tower will get just as clogged up over time as any other CPU tower. The same for stock Intel heatsink, the same for your reference blower GPUs.
I've had plenty of reference blowers which is why I believed in the myth you keep prescribing. Finally some time ago I did my own research and all the data I found is contrary to the myth (or what you keep saying). I built all my new systems around CPU tower heatsinks, modern case with good airflow and open-air GPU designs. The overall system noise is much quieter overall.
As far as PSU goes, I finally replaced my Corsair with a Seasonic Unit and the PSU fan doesn't work under 450W full load.
The loudest component in my system now by far is the GPU and it's quieter at 1150mhz at full load than any reference blower I've ever used other than the 8800GTS 320mb but that card barely used any power so such comparison seems invalid.
A GTX680 reference blower is not even remotely quiet compared to my card for example and my card is nowhere near one of the quieter after-market open air designs.
For example, Asus DirectCUII 680 is quieter at full load than your card is at idle. Go to
7.20-7.33 of this video. Reference GTX680 at gaming load is not a quiet card. So unless you have some magical GTX680, it is not a quiet or cool card at full load and instantly becomes the loudest component in a quiet modern system with a quiet CPU, case fans and PSU.
A reference NV or AMD blower fan design operating in games will have a higher noise level than the aggregate noise levels of after-market fans such as Thermalright TY-140 + after-market open-air designs of cards like Asus DirectCUII + quiet case fans and a hybrid PSU/quiet PSU. On top of this the after-market open air GPU will run cooler. This is why in a modern case, the system will be both quieter and the GPU will run much cooler, making a blower reference fan design inferior for modern cases with good airflow where only 1 GPU resides (or even 2 GPUs with sufficient spacing between them).