Guaranteed No-Fan-Spin AMD card?

[weezul]

Hey there.
I've been on High Sierra for a while with a silent passive 1050ti. I use my machine for recording audio mostly, and i need the machine to be as near silent as possible. It works really well at the moment and has done for years but I'm starting to use FCPX a lot more, and would like to upgrade to something like a RX590? It seems this would be a big improvement for FCPX performance.

Does anyone know of any brands of card that have guaranteed silent fans when load is under a certain percentage? I run with 3x monitors at the moment, 2x24 inch widescreens, and a 32 inch ultrawide (only 1080p). I normally just edit audio and record. Sometimes screen capture and recording at the same time. Idle, my machine sits at 30 degrees C currently, and under heavy load of CPU sits around 60-70.

Ideally I'd like the card's fans to be silent unless I start doing something GPU-heavy like FCPX. I don't mind tinkering to get it done but would like to know of some previous wins in this regard. Would also happily upgrade to Mojave to get it done, as it's only the nVidia card holding be back at the moment.

Does such a card exist?

 

[zipb]

My MSI RX480/8GB is silent(I researched this before buying) while using DAW's. Fans are turned off until the card reaches a certain temp, which never happens doing audio. I often record quiet acoustic instruments 4-5 feet from my rig with a Neumann KM184. My GPU is not a problem, noisy traffic sometimes is.

I also have a quiet(dampened) case/silent PSU(these can be noisy) and Noctua CPU/case fans.

 

[Gigamaxx]

The XFX fatboy is the most quiet bit the vbios is incompatible. Sapphire Nitro+ is the next best.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

It's a pity there are no fan-control drivers for these cards. There is for Windows and when you load the control-panel supplied by the manufacturer you see a temperature curve and sliders. In my experience the fans are defaulted to 60-degrees-C turn-on. When I experimented I reduced this to 40-degrees-C and they still didn't come on. However I was not hammering the graphics and this was on Windows.

This leads me to guess that VBIOS default is that 60-degrees, but there is no guaranteed silent fan mode on macOS. As @Gigamaxx suggests, you need to read reviews for the quietest on offer.

 

[weezul]

My MSI RX480/8GB is silent(I researched this before buying) while using DAW's. Fans are turned off until the card reaches a certain temp, which never happens doing audio. I often record quiet acoustic instruments 4-5 feet from my rig with a Neumann KM184. My GPU is not a problem, noisy traffic sometimes is.

I also have a quiet(dampened) case/silent PSU(these can be noisy) and Noctua CPU/case fans.

Thanks. We are in similar situations. My case is Fractal r4, Noctua heatsink and low power fans, and the traffic haha! My PSU is not silent, but it's damn quiet. It's also only 500w, so I may have to beef it up to power a card. Will look into it. My current card is powered through the PCIe slot only. I think a 580/590 will be a nice entry point for me. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07PHY5K6L/?tag=tonymacx86-21

The XFX fatboy is the most quiet bit the vbios is incompatible. Sapphire Nitro+ is the next best.

Cheers. Do sapphire nitro support no spin fans? Also how are you guys getting on with multiple monitors?Thanks again!

 

[zipb]

I normally use just one 43-inch 4k monitor. But all ports work, I have used 3 1080p screens and that worked fine. Gaming and 3d/video rendering are heavy on GPU, drawing a mixer or arrange window is easy.

 

[weezul]

Cheers zipb, ended up grabbing this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B071Y7CKM2/?tag=tonymacx86-21

Will report back on how it performs

 

[athei]

It's a pity there are no fan-control drivers for these cards.

There are. macOS AMD driver is able to override the vbios PowerPlay Table just like the windows driver does:

[TOOL] AMD Radeon RX 5700 (XT) PowerPlay Table generator

I did it again! With the release of the Navi drivers for macOS by Apple I bought a card and ported my popular PowerPlay Table generators to the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. Some might know I already did the same for V56/64 and Radeon VII. This tool allows you to change GPU, SoC and Memory Clocks, volt...

www.insanelymac.com

 

[UtterDisbelief]

There are. macOS AMD driver is able to override the vbios PowerPlay Table just like the windows driver does:

[TOOL] AMD Radeon RX 5700 (XT) PowerPlay Table generator

I did it again! With the release of the Navi drivers for macOS by Apple I bought a card and ported my popular PowerPlay Table generators to the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. Some might know I already did the same for V56/64 and Radeon VII. This tool allows you to change GPU, SoC and Memory Clocks, volt...

www.insanelymac.com

Looks interesting but limited in the scope of AMD cards it can work with. And it isn't 'drivers' as such, more a way to patch an existing table. Unless I misunderstand it ... What's more, do we really need to use Excel?!?

 

[athei]

The windows driver does the same thing: It patches an existing table. It just offers a nicer frontend than an excel sheet. And yes, unless someone comes up with another generator you need to use excel. For vega cards there is another generator which does not rely on excel: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...vega-power-and-fan-control-properties.267519/