Got a question here.

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by great_big_abyss

I was with you on that front, until I tried my 660 DirectCU. The 660 is to the double slot DirectCU heatsink as the 680 is to the triple slot DirectCU heatsink.

I cannot stress how nice it is to have completely silent video cards. The heatsinks don't have to work very hard at all. That would be worth the hassle of having a triple slot heatsink, in my mind alone.

Now, I just have to work on silencing the rest of my rig.

I know that card, its what went in my Cousins Rig.
And, I have one of the Original ROG Matrix Cards (260) that I won from the Folding contest in 09 here.
Still have it, and I know its quiet.
But, if you are truly innovative, you can do more with less. You just need the right engineers (take my 460 EE's for example), they stayed cooler than the Reference design while being Smaller.

The way I see it (maybe my view is flawed) is the triple slot design is compensating for poor thermal management and the best way the board partners compensated is by going bigger (which to me doesn't always mean better).

My thoughts, I've played with plenty of different cards. I prefer, at the end of the day....all my Heat to leave through the back.

-ST

[sh3p1]

Personally, I was using ATI GPUs since my very first PC. So I decided to change and try Nvidia for the very first time. I was doing a lot of research on the GTX 670/680 models, had my doubts and I decided to go with a GTX 680, since money currently isn't my problem.
First, I was absolutely sure about getting a MSI GTX 680 Lightning, because of the unlocked BIOS, available with flashing to the old "unlocked" BIOS, no voltage limitations? Hell yeah! But unfortunately, I couldn't find any store that had one in the stock.
So I ended up with this "just-ordered" Gigabyte GTX 680 Super Overclock. To be honest, I'm not sensible when it comes to noise, but I hope the GPU isn't TOO noisy. About the triple slot design, I got no problems as well, since I'm not planning to go more than 2-way SLI and neither does ASUS Maximus V Formula support 3-way SLI configuration (at least so I've heard).

[clshades]

if it was possible to mix the fans into 3 different brands similar type these sorts of whistles and whines wouldn't be as noticeable... there's a term for this sort of noise I just can't think of it right now.