I have a Radeon 5850 OC 2G / Windforce version.
It is without a doubt the most irritatingly loud graphics card I've ever heard. It was meant to go in my study, due to hearing issues I have made the computer there almost silent, it sighed. Until now.
When I first turned the computer on after installation I was blasted with a shockwave of sound, and figured that was 100% speed, until something took control of the fan. I don't know, now, all speeds seem the same.
There are two things that bug me here.
Take
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/2853/13/amd-radeon-hd-7850--7870-round-up-cooling-and-noise-production as an example. The XFX uses the same two fan setup, more quietly (much more quietly). The concept is very similar to that of the Gigabyte board. It doesn't cool as well, but it cools well enough, without making the card unusable, for have no doubt. I won't be keeping this card, unless a miracle is made. The store I bought it from won't accept a return, so it feels like I'll be begging for a buyer on the street.
The other issue is that the software fan control achieves little. Using EasyBoost (as Admin, and not) it is easy to push the fan from 20% duty cycle to 100%, and there is merely a slight change in pitch from the fans. When I ran some AMD DX11 demos, the fan speed jumped from 40% to 45%, with the GPU at full load. There's a mix up there.
The other end of the spectrum doesn't work either, I can pull the fan down to 4% duty cycle, with no change in sound or apparent cooling ability.
Those two, together, may indicate something wrong in the firmware both setting and reading incorrect fan settings.
I had bought a 27" Dell monitor on one of their sales recently, and realised I couldn't drive it; I'd been using, and was happy with, Intel HD graphics. The newer 77 chips seem to have DisplayPort facility, obviously a more sound (no pun) decision, but part of me still wants to drag open a game now and again, and I thought this'd be a nice companionship of monitor and card.
I didn't honestly think there could be that much difference in metrics within such a well defined set of boards, another mistake of mine. At any rate, I know I should have looked harder and shopped better, they're a reasonably expensive card, for me, and a loss of this nature hurts me indeed.
Robert
