Why don't you just underclock the card? I'm doing that with my Radeon 9800 Pro because I hate how hot it's getting.

That was the era of relatively high power draw and horribly insufficient flimsy coolers that barely kept the cards from bursting into flames while being loud as hell.

My solution with GeForce 6800 GT was to swap the stock cooler to Arctic Cooling NV Silencer and I was happy with it, something you could try yourself if you can find one of those. Just make sure it's compatible with your cards.

no underclocking, as I'm trying to squeeze out the maximum of the system, and no dual slot solutions (such as NV/Ati silencer), as they physically don't fit into the case...

How about newer generations of cards, such as X1600 / X1650 / 2600HD - do they heat up a lot? I'm not talking about 3850 (too hot and too strong) and 4670 (I have it with Ati Silencer, so it don't fit).

EDIT: Almost sounds like Quality / Price / Speed of delivery - choose two of three 😁

If a 7900 at standard clocks is your minimum performance requirement and you want to maintain compatibility with older games, there's not much choice. The faster models of the ATI X1000 series have a TDP that is twice that of your 7900, so that is not any better. There are some budget variants in the Radeon X1000 series that have a slightly newer manufacturing process (80nm instead of 90nm), the Radeon X1650XT is such a card. But I'm not sure if it would be that much of an improvement. I had an X1650 Pro with a single slot cooler at that time, I remember it stayed quite cool but the performance was also disappointing.

The next generation of cards (Geforce 8 and Radeon HD 2000) has much better efficiency, but according to what I've read they also have poor compatibility with many older games.

The Geforce 7000 series is very efficient for its performance, and in my opinion, an underclocked 7000 card is one of the best, quietest options available.

7900GS not my minimum performance requirement, the the stronger the better I would say... I could even go as low as an Ati 9700 PRO card, I remember them having a relatively small cooler - does it mean they also not being warm alot?

I don't have a 7300 GT / 7600 GT card unfortunately, so I could compare it to 7900GS, which is quite cooler to 7800GS, and just slightly faster. I only have X1600Pro, maybe I could give it a try as well...

You can undervolt GeForce 6800GT and install passive cooling.

No, the Radeon 9700 runs extremely hot. But as I said you could underclock that too, and it's still plenty fast for games from 2003.

If performance to watt ratio is your goal, using a modern card and underclocking it is way more effective than installing an older card with lower TDP. If you were to underclock your 7900 to the clock speed of a Radeon 9700 Pro, it would be both faster and cooler.

The X1650 Pro is as fast as a Geforce 7600 and a lot slower than your current Geforce 7900.

How about a permanent BIOS flash for 7900GS with new lower clocks, is it possible to achieve that? Maybe that would be the best solution... and if only I could sort out the problem of annoying GPU cooler, the bearing of the fan became loud..

There seems to be this BIOS editor for NVIDIA cards:

https://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=34362

I have never tried that, though. As a fellow member suggested above, that would additionally allow you to undervolt the card to run even cooler. However, I have no idea how you would be able to test your voltages before flashing the new BIOS. I don't think you can undervolt these cards using only the driver.

If the card doesn't boot up anymore, would you be able to boot the computer with a PCI card and flash the BIOS of the AGP card to the previous version?

BoYan wrote on 2024-03-12, 09:50:

How about a permanent BIOS flash for 7900GS with new lower clocks, is it possible to achieve that? Maybe that would be the best solution... and if only I could sort out the problem of annoying GPU cooler, the bearing of the fan became loud..

Lowering clockspeed will do practically nothing.

I have a MSI Geforce 7600 GT, and I remember that changing the clock speeds in the driver options did absolutely nothing. There was no change in temperature, performance or power consumption. I had always assumed this was a bug, either in the card's hardware or the drivers. It would be interesting to see if changing the clock speeds in the BIOS makes any difference, I might try that later.

Or how 'bout you ditch AGP for PCI-E? Lots of powerful, passively cooled cards to choose from in that variant.

An Asus AH3650 Silent is a good option too IMO., for Socket 939 it has plenty of power.

...I didn't catch the "Shuttle SN95G5 SFF" part of the original post. Well you are looking for trouble then, small case and low noise at the same time can be challenging. Why not just a small Micro-ATX case?

I love the design and compactness of this case and the idea it accommodates a solid 939 x2 CPU, with good sound (x-fi) and good graphics, also managed to squeeze wifi in the case via USB extension cable.... very portable and enough capable for LAN parties I hope to attend.

So it remains down to 7900GS... how about Radeon X800 series? they seem to me quiet enough and heat up less than 7900, at least in a regular case?

BoYan wrote on 2024-03-12, 14:23:

I love the design and compactness of this case and the idea it accommodates a solid 939 x2 CPU, with good sound (x-fi) and good graphics, also managed to squeeze wifi in the case via USB extension cable.... very portable and enough capable for LAN parties I hope to attend.

So it remains down to 7900GS... how about Radeon X800 series? they seem to me quiet enough and heat up less than 7900, at least in a regular case?

An X800 might be a better choice. I get high temps on all NVidia's bridged cards. X800 will at least be native AGP.

I tried some modded bioses on my 7600 GT to see how much power can be saved. I have to say the results were pretty underwhelming. First I cut the clock speeds in half from 560/400 to 280/200. The FPS dropped by half, the temperature under full load dropped from 72c to 64c, the power consumption dropped by 9 watts. So around 25% power savings and a 50% performance drop, that's not a good tradeoff.

Next I tried undervolting. My card has a default voltage of 1.1v, I reduced it to 0.9v, but it had no effect on power consumption at all. Either my card can't be undervolted or something in the BIOS was not setup correctly. According to some forum posts it should work, but I had no luck so far.

Edit: Okay, I think I understand why it didn't work. You can't just type in any voltage you want, it just serves as a label that's linked to predefined voltage IDs, and my card had none defined. It most probably won't work with this card.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-12, 19:21:

I tried some modded bioses on my 7600 GT to see how much power can be saved. I have to say the results were pretty underwhelming. First I cut the clock speeds in half from 560/400 to 280/200. The FPS dropped by half, the temperature under full load dropped from 72c to 64c, the power consumption dropped by 9 watts. So around 25% power savings and a 50% performance drop, that's not a good tradeoff.

Yep, underclocking without undervolting was never a thing. It works for overclocking though, because increased power consumption is negligible.

Next I tried undervolting. My card has a default voltage of 1.1v, I reduced it to 0.9v, but it had no effect on power consumption at all. Either my card can't be undervolted or something in the BIOS was not setup correctly. According to some forum posts it should work, but I had no luck so far.

Nvidia had software modifiable voltage only on GeForce 6800/6800GT/6800 Ultra cards. You can change it in 1.1-1.4v range.

I also have one regular 6800 (non-GT, non-ultra, non-XT), only issue is only 128MB of GDDR, but I could give it a try to have a software volt-mod