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Phantom coolers..

Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Soldato
Joined
29 Sep 2010
Posts
6,508
How many people own a phantom card? The coolers look awesome but i'd like some everyday people to comment on how good they are, thinking of a possible gtx 570 phantom or 580 if I can stretch to it after christmas.
 
vram. With the 570 and 580 it's not really about the cooler (well, the phantom does look nice) but more about how much vram.

Get a 2.5gb 570 or 3gb 580.
 
ALXAndy said:
vram. With the 570 and 580 it's not really about the cooler (well, the phantom does look nice) but more about how much vram.

Get a 2.5gb 570 or 3gb 580.
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Nope. Don't do that that unless you're going SLI, or might possibly go SLI in the future. You will notice 0% improvements by buying the extra vram versions of those cards.

On topic: the Gainward Phantom cards are very well regarded. The cooling is very good. On a par with the TFIII or Asus DCII solutions.
 
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I use a 580 Phantom.

I had a stock cooled 580 before it and this one's much quieter, although stock wasn't exactly noisy compared to the stock 400s.

On full load, temps usually climb into the low 70s in my case, which doesn't really have any air intake, so I reckon it's a pretty good cooler.

It looks shiney too :cool:
 
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kissenger said:
Nope. Don't do that that unless you're going SLI, or might possibly go SLI in the future. You will notice 0% improvements by buying the extra vram versions of those cards.

On topic: the Gainward Phantom cards are very well regarded. The cooling is very good. On a par with the TFIII or Asus DCII solutions.
Click to expand...

BF3 uses over 1.5gb of vram with AA set to 4x.
 
I had a 560Ti with the Phantom cooler. It was quiet, but the temps weren't that impressive (but that was probably down to the poorly ventilated case it was in).
 
ALXAndy said:
Are they as much of a sod to keep clean as they look? Do the fans come out?
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Mine's pretty easy to clean. Just a quick poke around with a brush and it's good to go; the side of it offers a lot of access to the fans, I haven't tried taking them out yet though. Haven't seen a need to.
 
I've got a 580 3gb phantom, it's virtually silent and hits 60C on load, however my highest overclock is not even 850, thought 900 was stable because of furmark but then playing BF3 I suddenly got really bad artifacts (temp not even 65C) bumping up the volts slightly just made the artifacting worse and dropping to 850 didn't fix it, need to start again to find a stable OC

the cooler is fantastic, however it seems to me that gainward get all the chips that EVGA and Asus don't want and they simply refuse to OC (my 560ti was also a gainward with really low temps but refusing to OC)
 
ALXAndy said:
BF3 uses over 1.5gb of vram with AA set to 4x.
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MW3 on PC uses 2Gb at max settings also mate. Doesn't mean you will see any difference in frame rates at 1080p or less. Vram usage doesn't tell the full story. You're better off looking at FPS comparisons between the same card with different amounts of vram on them. There is almost no difference whatsoever (i.e. usually less than 1FPS in it) unless we're talking SLI, in which case you are effectively doubling computing power with no corresponding increase in vram size, which makes 2GB+ cards worthwhile.
 
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