How loud is the Radeon 5870?

[Taipan]

Hi!

I'm thinking about replacing the Radeon 4870 in my Mac Pro 4,1 with a Radeon 5870. Can anybody tell me about the 5870's fan noise compared to the 4870? What bothers me a bit with the 4870 is that while it's not particularly loud, it catches your attention by always spinning up for a moment with every little action you take, like scrolling in Safari. How is the 5870 in comparison?
Thanks for your input!

 

[satcomer]

In my 2008 Mac Pro it has been just as quiet as the original card, whisper quiet.

 

[DanielCoffey]

My 5870 did not adjust its fan speed from near-silent until I started putting it to work by playing games. The fan noise when at full tilt was audible of course but gradually span down when the game was closed.

I decided to take the plunge and replace the stock cooler with a more efficient and quieter one - the Arctic Cooler Accelero XTREME Plus.

As you will see, I have given fitting pics of it in my MP 2010 as it is a close squeeze.

The new cooler is quieter at idle (though the stock cooler is fairly well behaved too) but this new one is significantly quieter at load and cools down much faster once the load is removed.

 

[derbothaus]

I can't really hear mine unless I am booting up or playing a Video game but even then it never goes farther than 1900 RPM on the fan so still super quiet compared to all the other cards I've owned. Mac and PC.

 

[goMac]

Not loud at all. If you listen close, you can hear a fan, but I already have 4 hard drives in there anyway, so it's not at all noticeable compared to that.

 

[Kimmo]

Not loud at all. If you listen close, you can hear a fan, but I already have 4 hard drives in there anyway, so it's not at all noticeable compared to that.

Same here. Four HD's and the 5870 sitting on my office desk. Not loud.

 

[gpzjock]

Flashed ones are good too.

I used a Sapphire 4870 Vapor-X card before replacing it with a Sapphire Vapor-X HD5870. The 4870 was louder than the 5870 but both were extremely quiet. The Vapor-X cooler is amazing in it's performance I can't recommend them enough. Even when caning either one with WoW on high settings they were hardly audible.

 

[chaosbunny]

I can barely hear mine, and my Mac Pro is sitting on the desk. Even when playing games I don't notice it, the fans spin up a little but when listening to the game I don't hear them.

 

[Taipan]

Do they also rev up noticably under light load like scrolling in Safari?

 

[donw35]

I only hear mine when playing games and even then it's not noticeable

 

[Kimmo]

Do they also rev up noticably under light load like scrolling in Safari?

Not to my ears.

 

[Taipan]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Thanks for your many answers!