This is Gigabyte's Super Overclock GTX 680 With 5 Fans

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The article describes the fans as blowing upward. This only applies if your PC lies on its side. Also, those tiny fans seem to have far less capacity to move air than even one decent sized GPU fan. Notice the center caps are about as large as regular fans, so that there is hardly any actually fan blade surface left to move air through those tiny slots. It looks to be a total of about 2.5" of usable fan blade surface area.
 
i've had nothing but bad experiences with those little fans, they either become noisy after a week of use or just fail after a year of use. those fans move less air and create more noise. it would have made more sense to put in an axial fan on the side with longer fins. the point is mote as either of these still ventilates hot exhaust air into the case to be recirculated over and over until there is very little air not less than a few degrees of the heat dissipators.
i don't understand this line of self defeating reasoning in cooling method.
 
[citation][nom]DRosencraft[/nom]Yeah, interesting idea, but the noise level will likely be a problem. Love Gigabyte, but I think this might not be their best idea. Let's do a little conceptualizing. Let's say that they manage to get each fan here to run at max RPM but only ~20dba. That's an effective total of ~100dba. Compare that to three 120mm or 140mm fans that will push the same amount of air if not more while running at the same 20dba, for an effective ~60dba. My guess is that this design is all about the performance of placing those fans on the side of the card rather than how many fans there are. The card would probably look weird if they limited to only three or so fans on the side, so they went for a little better aesthetics, sacrificed a little on noise, and hope that not too many people have need to crank this thing up too much.[/citation]
My speakers don't hit 100 decibals.
I'll let you know a secret: 23db is 2x as loud as 20dba, and 30dba is 10x as loud as 20dba. 5x20dba is somewhere around 27 dba. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
[citation][nom]Gargtholomew[/nom]This is becoming like the razor blades of 10 yrs ago.....3blades, no 4 blades, no 5 blades, etc.any bets on fan count in 10 years?[/citation]

There will be no fans. The successor would be an electrostatic fluid accelerator. Extremely quiet and efficient due to minimized turbulence, and long operational lifetime.

http://sparkingtech.com/tech-sci-news/new-laptop-fan-cools-with-no-moving-parts/
 
[citation][nom]DRosencraft[/nom]Yeah, interesting idea, but the noise level will likely be a problem. Love Gigabyte, but I think this might not be their best idea. Let's do a little conceptualizing. Let's say that they manage to get each fan here to run at max RPM but only ~20dba. That's an effective total of ~100dba. Compare that to three 120mm or 140mm fans that will push the same amount of air if not more while running at the same 20dba, for an effective ~60dba. My guess is that this design is all about the performance of placing those fans on the side of the card rather than how many fans there are. The card would probably look weird if they limited to only three or so fans on the side, so they went for a little better aesthetics, sacrificed a little on noise, and hope that not too many people have need to crank this thing up too much.[/citation]

DBA is exponential. Ever 10DBA is double, if I remember correctly. Five fans at 20dba does not equal 100dba. Five fans at 20dba, if noise can be calculated in such a way (I don't think that it can, but I'm no expert on audio), would probably be less than 30dba. That's practically silent. Even if noise can be calculated like this, I'd be far more worried about the pitch and how much air it can even move rather than how loud it is if we went by your theoretical numbers. I'd also be worried about getting the hot air out of the case. This card would probably need some serious side exhaust.
 
[citation][nom]soldier37[/nom]Still only 2Gb memory, I'll pass waiting for the next round of 4Gb cards for my 2560 x 1600 display thanks.[/citation]

Factory overclocked GTX 670 4GBs are roughly identical in performance to the GTX 680 while having 4GB of VRAM instead of 2GB. Newegg has at least one such GTX 670 available right now.
 
[citation][nom]upgrade_1977[/nom]I don't care what kind of cooling it has, 3 slot coolers are just not acceptable.[/citation]

Quite a few people would disagree with you. Considering that the current $2K SBM build has a three slot GTX 680, I'd say that Tom's disagrees with this too.
 
3 slots? Unnecessarily ridiculous.

5 Fans? If it's using a fan at all, it's because it was designed poorly. There are other ways to dissipate heat than slapping a fan on something. Fans do not last. That is a fact. Both sleeve and ball bearing designs suck and fail. Slowing down/freezing when getting gummed up, chattering, vibrating. Small fans are even worse not to mention more effected by dirt on the blades since they have such little fan area.

They probably think this is some hip creative design but the reality is that the designer of this garbage needs to be fired for incompetence.
 
What a dumb concept; what do you play with these uber-powerful video cards? There are no games on the PC anymore that would utilize even half of this card's power. Crysis?!? Isn't that from 1982? Waste of money.
 
[citation][nom]jorna167[/nom]What a dumb concept; what do you play with these uber-powerful video cards? There are no games on the PC anymore that would utilize even half of this card's power. Crysis?!? Isn't that from 1982? Waste of money.[/citation]

Many modern games would max out at 2560x1600 on this card. Almost all games in the last several years could max out this graphics card if you have high enough resolution. 5760x1080 could need more than a single GTX 680 because it's too much for it in many games. Three cheaper 1080p displays could be bought for under $500 to $600 to get that 5760x1080. It's expensive, but this is among the high end of modern gaming.
 
I think they just found a very good way of turning the gtx680 into a GPU you wouldn't want inside your computer, along those lines this card is a success!

Congrats Gigabyte!
 
For all those questioning the lack of large fans, that is because the card is designed for SLI and is a 3 slot design, this leave no space for the standard fan design so a server style cooling solution is used. This allows 2 cards to be installed and still have proper airflow from the bottom area near the PCI-e connector and other small vents.

A design like that will be louder, but since the fans are not very close to the external vents, less noise will escape from the case, and if you can afford that card, then you can afford some noise dampening material to stick on the panels of the case
 
[citation][nom]Razor512[/nom]For all those questioning the lack of large fans, that is because the card is designed for SLI and is a 3 slot design, this leave no space for the standard fan design so a server style cooling solution is used. This allows 2 cards to be installed and still have proper airflow from the bottom area near the PCI-e connector and other small vents.A design like that will be louder, but since the fans are not very close to the external vents, less noise will escape from the case, and if you can afford that card, then you can afford some noise dampening material to stick on the panels of the case[/citation]

Perhaps, but it still doesn't exhaust the hot air out of the case, does it? Noise-dampening foam could make the heat issue worse. GB could have used a shroud and thrown on another fan in the back of the card near the PCIe power connectors and another in the front of the card to push the air out of the case. Then, they could brag about having even more fans and the card would exhaust hot air out of the case and I think without choking cards below it for air. It would need some good side intake fans on the case, but it should improve Gigabyte's solution.
 
panel fans draw air in, these fans draw air in the opposite direction -- not going to work at all.

also they look of cheap quality they wont last.

ill stick to my reference cooler design, atleast the vrm is cooled and the fan will last past 2 years.
 
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