#XFX RADEON HD 6850 FAN LOUD FULL#
I have about 12+ case fans, and the loudest one is around 45bdA when its cranked up to full blast, and pushes 171 CFM, which is pretty much retarded. It's basically like if you crank this fan up to 100% you might baaaaaaarely hear it over the other fans, but if you're in a game that is stressing out your card GPU that much, you aren't going to hear it over the action. Most of my fans are 120mm, but a lot of the older 80mm fans can average around 40dbA if they push a lot of air. In short, if the fan noise is rated between 35-45dbA (which I didn't know, thanks for the info) then most case fans that are 120mm or more are going to be a little bit quieter than that. I have not been able to stress out either card much at all since I don't have any crazy games to push their limits (though I did consider Max Payne 3, the first one was pretty good). I'm thinking it's possible to do more with it, but again, I'm not a huge gamer, and my other card is a Radeon HD 6850 that only 1GB RAM and runs at about 52% fan speed at 50-55 degrees unless I am benchmarking. I'm pretty new to overclocking video cards though, I just started tweaking my GPU stuff when I was playing around with the new features of the latest AMD Catalyst and have been reading as I go. I have mine overclocked by about 10% for GPU clock and memory clock, but when I mess with the voltages too much beyond 4%, my system gets a little flaky, if not completely crashes. Muhahah!) That said, with MSI Afterburner, you can actually tune the fan curve to speed up and slow down based on GPU temps, which is pretty cool.
I have found that this card runs its fan at around 39% fan speed and 44 degrees almost all the time, but I'm really not a huge gamer, I just have 4 monitors going (soon to be 5 is this whole DisplayPort adapter I just ordered works out. In fact, I can barely hear it at all unless I crank it up with the case door off and put my ear up to the open case. When I crank up the fan control setting to 100% I can't hear it over my other case fans. Excludes: Angola, Burundi, Benin, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cameroon, Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Congo, Republic of the, Comoros, Cape Verde Islands, Djibouti, Algeria, Egypt, Eritrea, Western Sahara, Ethiopia, Gabon Republic, Ghana, Guinea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Lesotho, Morocco, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Malawi, Mayotte, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Rwanda, Senegal, Saint Helena, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, Tunisia, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan Republic, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Aruba, Anguilla, Netherlands Antilles, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Belize, Barbados, Costa Rica, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Martinique, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Turks and Caicos Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, British Virgin Islands, Virgin Islands (U.S.I have the 2GB version of this video card, and I am able to tweak the fan control with the AMD Graphic Overdrive setting in the newest version of Catalyst, but also other overclocking software.