Legit Reviews

Moving from quiet laptop to desktop to do photo editing in PSCS and Lightroom; no gaming or video editing. Dell choices of cards are as follows - any that are likely to be quieter than the others?

nVIDIA GeForce G310 512MB DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5
nVidia GeForce GTS240 1024MB GDDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5



Without using extra software "hack" to set profile to adjust fan speed; how does fan work? Does it basically have just three settings (idle, on, and full) or does it ramp thru all of its possible Rpm range to whatever is set as it maximum?

If it has several steps, for the same Photoshop task with demand on GPU would a "higher capacity" card work less hard and therefore perhaps be at a slower quieter fan speed than a "lower capacity" card that might have to crank up fan speed for same task?

NOTE since this asks about both ATI and Nvidia I have posted ? in both sub-forums.

Thanks for any assistance.

GPU fans generally go up linearly to what your temperature is at, usually a couple % fans speed to every 2-3 degrees but some cards are very different

there is no telling what type of gpu you will get, what brand or what heatsink is equipped, as some of the GPUs are actually fanless (best fanless GPU I know of is the 5770) for photoshop I would say that the 5770 is the best card you would want as it has more power than needed and much cheaper than the 5870

the G310 has a small fan, but these can generally be loud
all the other cards are a mixed bag, you have no idea what type of heatsink it will come with.

If you REALLY want it to be quiet, I would just get the cheapest package and buy a fanless GPU off newegg.com like the
Zotac GT 240
Gigabyte 9800GT
Visiontek HD 5450
Sapphire HD 4550

there are many more, and going by the Visiontek 5450, i'd go with that package from dell as it might be a silent version and be enough power for what you need, as photoshop is more CPU and RAM dependant than graphics (depending what you are doing)

Thx skier, between your reply and additional Google search and reading I think I have the info I need.