Radeon 7970 Windforce OC

[ztah]

Hi,
I just bought the above mentioned card and the cooling solution isnt as quiet at idle as I thought it would be. The card idle with 33% fan speed (23 dB at 36% according to gigabyte support) and the rest of my computer is at around 16-17 dB when it idles so I can hear the card above the rest of my fans and harddrives.
The card is quiet for me at 20% fan speed so I'm using a third party software to make it use 20% fan speed below 39C on the GPU then it goes at about the same as the BIOS wants it to.
However to the issue, I want a BIOS for the card that makes it run at 20% fan speed on idle so it fits nicely with the rest of the computer noise but gigabyte refuses to send me a bios that does that which makes me wonder. Gigabyte doesnt want satisfied customers?
I had a XFX card before which also idled at around 33% fan speed but I just made a ticket to XFX support and they supplied me with a BIOS that used 20% at idle.

I think it's pretty bad that gigabyte doesnt want to take 5 minutes to just change the BIOS fan curve a bit and send it to me.

Conclusion: Thumbs down for gigabyte and I wont buy anything from them again because of this. They make nice components in my opinion but their support and will to satisfy the single customer is just low.

I just wanted to share this with others here and yes, 23 dB is much for me, I'm sensitive to sounds and high (anything higher than about 17 dB) idle sounds from my computer bothers me alot.

[beattie282]

Hello, sorry to ask this in your post but since you have the same card as me i would like to ask you about the buzzzing noise my card makes underload.

does yours do this? its fine up untill it hits the 1000mhz clock then bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzz bzzzzz bbbbzzzzzzz

its not the fans since when i stop playing bf3 it just stops buzzing

i have a video on my phone which i will upload to youtube later on

thanks in advanced

Beattie282

[ztah]

Hi,
I had alot of coilwhine as it's called when I first put load on the card for the first time but it got better after a few hours of bf3 and now I only hear it when the fans are idling and I put load on it, then when the fans speed up a bit I cant hear it anymore due to the fans being more noisy.

It seems that some cards are worse and some are better regarding the coilwhine. It seems that most 7970's out there do this coilwhine more or less due to the AMD reference design (correct me if I'm wrong).

If it's really loud you should RMA your card though.

/Ztah