Fan noise of new GTX 680 or HD 7950?

[Cubemmal]

I might do one last graphics card swap on my 2009 Pro. I have the ATI 5770 which is nearly silent. I learned a trick which is that from a cold boot the graphics fan is audible, but if I immediately do a reboot it is silent which I like.

Anyhow I am considering either

• EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition
• Sapphire HD 7950 3GB

The two new cards basically. Any thoughts on noise and relative performance?

 

[DanielCoffey]

I have a PC Sapphire 7950 3Gb Flex Edition with Boost which has twin fans and at idle it is barely audible. It is certainly much quieter under load than my previous card - a 5870 which I had fitted a triple-fan cooler to in 2010.

I have no other cards to compare it against but I would say it is very quiet indeed.

The first thing I did was to follow the instructions on Netkas and flashed it with the EFI bios so I now have the boot screens although I am limited to PCI-E 1.0 2.5GT/s on the Mac side. Since I don't use it for rendering I can't say I really feel that restriction.

 

[GP-SE]

I have a PC GTX 680 flashed with EFI. Since I have a 4,1 Mac Pro like you, I also get the fast PCI-E\Power Supply Fan on a cold boot, but a stress test (OpenGL Extension Viewer) will quiet those fans.

I had a HD 7950 and my current EVGA GTX 680 is more quiet, even while gaming the card barely makes any noise.

 

[bsbeamer]

Recently replaced a 2010/2012 Mac Pro's 5770 with a non-flashed reference GTX 680 (Zotac ZT-60101-10P GTX 680 2GB) and the fan noise increase is extremely minor. Machine is virtually silent with mainly SSDs. Do hear the "storage" HDD spin up every so often, but even that is minor.

 

[pastrychef]

I've had both GTX 670 and GTX 680 in my machine (at different times) and both have been extremely quiet.